Comment by ddellacosta | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ddellacosta | Hacker News Reader

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I can't read this article due to the paywall, but here's my lukewarm take based on the title at least: "nobody" codes in Perl any more because the language lost a lot of mindshare in the transition from Perl 5 to Perl 6, a.k.a. Raku. And regardless it's always been a fairly idiosyncratic language in a lot of ways. Stuff like Ruby (which inherits DNA from Perl along with Lisp and Smalltalk), PHP (also takes some notes from Perl, perhaps more superficially), and Python ate a lot of its lunch.

It was the first language I wrote professionally and I always thought it was a lot of fun, but if I want to be humbled these days I reach for Haskell (like a lot of the Perl community it sounds like...).

EDIT: okay I read the article, thanks to welpo for the archive link. Yeah this is kind of a nostalgic piece so I think my original comment is still relevant. I do like Perl still, I will always have a spot in my heart for it. I appreciate especially how seriously Larry Wall tried to think about approaching things vis-a-vis linguistics even if I don't necessarily think that's the best approach for a language used by an engineering team these days.

I hope it sticks around in any case. It is truly unique.

I agree it was a combination of Raku and Ruby. As far as I'm concerned, Ruby deprecates Perl 5. It fills the same niche while avoiding a lot of the absolutely crazier parts of Perl (no shade; Perl was designed in a far different time and place). If you know Ruby, there is essentially zero reason to learn Perl. I have fond memories of the language, it was the first one I wrote professionally, but never again.

Raku being in such an indeterminate state for so long was an eternity for it to lose mindshare to Ruby.

> If you know Ruby, there is essentially zero reason to learn Perl.

I don't think I ever thought about it but I think I have implicitly taken this to heart since I last was using Perl seriously. Almost every engineering org I've worked for in the last decade has had Ruby as a part of its stack for e.g. scripting or lambdas and it's what I reach for when I need to script something. And I've done Rails work in a few orgs too, which has few parallels in its niche even without considering Perl.

Although I suspect for most people Python is where they land if we're just talking about scripting or hacking something together...or anything (I hate it but it is what it is lol).

> If you know Ruby, there is essentially zero reason to learn Perl

When I still used Perl (10y ago) Ruby was notably slower on many tasks. Ruby probably the slowest among popular script languages.

Bordering on zero percent of projects too performance sensitive to be written in Ruby should be written in Perl instead.

I used Perl extensively for small-network (~25 boxen) sysadmin and local/personal tooling, but never in cluster/multi-node deployed production. It gave too much freedom for expression making it difficult to "team-scale".

I stopped using it circa 2000 for no real reason other than Python was easier for teams to adopt and common modules became well-maintained enough where CPAN was no longer a competitive advantage. It also helped that Guido lived and worked a few minutes north in Reston, VA back then.

That said, I still "think" in Perl regex to this very day. ;)

> That said, I still "think" in Perl regex to this very day. ;)

Yeah good point, if there's one thing from Perl that will live far longer than the language itself it's PCREs. I can't thank my experience with the language enough for my facility in crafting regexps.

Agreed, Perl introduced me to REGEX and hashes. To this day, whenever I do any work with data, I tend to think in terms of REGEX first rather than convoluted string manipulation.

Like many paywalls it goes away if you turn off JS.

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