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Comment by great_wubwub | Hacker News Reader

I haven't done anything with Perl since 4.036 in the late 90s, so I haven't kept up with all the Raku stuff. From that outsider perspective my first reaction to this was "how many languages are they going to turn Perl into?"

There's a perl 5.

There's no perl 6 because it's too much not like perl.

There's a perl 7 but it looks like it'll have two totally different syntaxes for stuff

And maybe there's a perl 8 but maybe with the same syntax as one of the flavors of 7?

I still see no compelling reason to get interested in perl. I have python for some stuff and go for some other stuff. What does perl do for me that these two can't?

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Python and Go are pathologically bad at the things Perl does well.

I still use one-liners all the time, and when I need to implement a non-trivial, but small stream transformation, the resulting perl is << 1/10th the size of the unmaintainable python my coworkers would write.

I've looked at plenty of perl and even maintained a little, but never fully grokked it, not implemented something from scratch in it.

Though I understand what you are saying, I sometimes feel the same with combinations of awk, sed, and other utils.

Though I suspect perl could be more powerful for that kind of processing.

Perl is so ubiquitous that makes awk and sed pretty redundant, if not outright worse. Perl regular expressions are so much better than whatever ugly mishmash sed uses that I haven't touched it in years.

I usually use perl with a combination of cut, grep and sort. If I had awk and sed in muscle memory, I’d definitely use them in some places where I use perl (awk and sed require fewer keystrokes for certain tasks).

I also like using perl for non-trivial stuff. For instance: parse a file, stick stuff in a hashtable or two, then iterate over the keys in sorted order, check a bunch of invariants, and then emit some other wonky format by chasing keys in the hashtables.

Some day, I hope to master the techniques in this book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_AWK_Programming_Language

which includes an RDBMS and assembler + interpreter, and then culminates in a 4 page section that implements make.

At that point, I might be able to switch away from perl.

I don't think this is true. There's Perl 5 and there's Raku.

All that happened is Perl 6 became Raku because some people didn't want Perl changing that much.

So Perl will jump version 6 and naturally evolve into Perl 7 at some point.

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