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Comment by petepete | Hacker News Reader

I did a fair amount of Perl just over a decade ago but can't really see any situation where I'd reach for it over Ruby now. Ruby has Perl's text manipulation goodness with a saner syntax.

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Performance.

Perl was a legit tool in bioinformatics due to its insane text parsing performance. Ruby performance is absolute garbage.

I learned Perl in the mid 2000s because I was working with a company that took text (and sometimes spreadsheet) dumps of public records data and processed them into a database. The entire ETL pipeline was a set of Perl scripts, and, as far as I know, that system is still running. The Perl iteration was actually the second iteration of that system - the first iteration was a set of C programs and shell scripts that were replaced over time.

The rich ecosystem of tested Perl modules for file formats along with the testing frameworks made coping with change bearable - not enjoyable, but bearable.

Oh man the ecosystem. I still think CPAN set the bar for what a high-quality language ecosystem should look like. npm and rubygems look like amateur hour by comparison.

And ubiquity: there’s a Perl for almost all systems

I wonder for how long..

> I wonder for how long..

Is anything ever really taken out of /usr/bin once it gets in there? It may be a long long /usr/bin/time.

OpenBSD ships it by default, with Pledge support.

I still do my NLP preprocessing in perl for this exact reason

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