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Comment by temporallobe | Hacker News Reader

Perl is my first love, and I still whip it out from time to time to do system tasks (anything in the linux world). It is literally installed on any *nix OS, macOS included. Python is fine, but it’s not as universal as Perl. I also feel like Perl is more “batteries included” as many times I can be productive without “use”ing any libraries. It’s has been my secret weapon over the years. I’ve also noticed that most younger engineers don’t know it, and if they know any scripting language at all, it’s of course python.

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Indeed. As a younger engineer I learned Perl during a brief stint as manager (because I didn't have time to do real programming, but I still needed to automate things). I have no regrets. It is one of the most useful languages I know, transcending what I do for a living.

> It is literally installed on any *nix OS, macOS included.

To my horror/surprise, not necessarily so any more. A whole lot of the OS parts that used perl have been ported away, or no longer part of the OS. It's entirely possible to run production workloads on RHEL without perl installed, for example.

I had a nice perl script I'd written ages ago that I sort of trundled around with me for a while, that could extract multi-line stack traces from plain text logs if any of the lines matched a certain string, and couldn't because no perl. I had to quickly rewrite it in python (wasn't hard to do, admittedly)

MSN Messenger contact bots got me in to perl back at 15, 35 now and still coding it for work as a legacy maintainer. Pays well.

Nice similar age, I got into it as my first job after university and every job since

My experience with Perl is that often the batteries are rotting.

Not a strong opinion though, i haven’t been writing perl in a while.

The analogy is quite the opposite here.

Python was always the "rotting batteries" for me.... write something, some migration script, run it, works, forget. A few years later, new servers, hey, guess what, python 2.6 script has problems running on python 2.7... luckily a small fix. A fw years go by... new servers,.. hey, python 2.7 is not installed by default anymore, and pip has issues with dual versions... fix that. Few years... python 2.7 not even in repos anymore...

It's like that battery powered gadget, you use once every few years, and leave the battery inside, only to find out they leaked by them time you need to use the device again (duracell, i'm looking at you).

With perl it's more like a solar calculator... turn it on, it works, do whatever, put it in a drawer and forget about it for the next few years.

I never mentioned python in my comment, though

> My experience with Perl is that often the batteries are rotting.

I think the batteries metaphor was meant to refer to the std lib, or (for Perl) the "CPAN" modules that are part of the core. The Perl core always keeps those batteries charged because they can't do a release if any of those are dead. They even ejected problematic modules, or those that were long since defunct, from the core so they don't have to deal with them. Python went through this exercise as well: https://peps.python.org/pep-0594/

The core Perl devs will also go to great effort to test against the entirety of CPAN ("blead breaks CPAN" testing), but some of those distributions haven't been maintained in decades so they have to draw the line somewhere. Fortunately if it's on CPAN then it's forkable (for the most part) so someone can take up maintenance.

Can you give a specific example?

I can't recall what modules my boss created but he had heart attack and passed away. So his modules are now left unmaintained.

Fortunately, new version realises of perl don't break CPAN modules that much. But there have been a decrease and of programmers that have either moved on or are passing away.

Without a younger audience not to maintain they're left to rot. Python will encounter the same when a new language hits the block in years to come.

This is terribly sad to hear. Perl used to be so ubiquitous and it is sad to see that it is rapidly fading away. I know of no one in my friend circle who has EVER used Perl.

Perl has been my go-to language for years now. Just yesterday I needed to write a little tool to stream some scraped metrics into a ClickHouse database. I was shocked to see that there aren't first-class Perl libraries for ClickHouse, and those on CPAN are seemingly fairly old/unmaintained. That's a real bummer.

I could always go with the MySQL interface, but I'd prefer to stay native if possible.

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