Hacker News Reader

I sometimes wonder how different things might have been if Perl had been the dominant scripting language at the time that ChatGPT, Codex, Claude Code and other tools like that became available.

Would Python have been able to compete, in a world where Perl could be readily comprehended by LLMs?

So, maybe what killed Perl was lack of VS Code forks and lack of being agentic.

View on HN

So then we'd have 100x as much "vibe coding" as now? <shudders>

Even if I disagree with our AI code assistant's usefulness - it often just suggests code based on "someone else in a different file used this statement after that last API call" that is totally irrelevant to my current needs - I can usually assess AI-generated code (C++ / python) relatively quickly and determine if it's what I want or not. It generally nails the "you just created this variable and now want to print it to the log" part pretty well.

Debugging AI-generated perl?? It would be like trying to follow "obfuscated C contest" entries all day, every day. No thanks!

The flip side to this is that perl often favored brevity over simplicity. It turns out that this is also a really useful attribute when working with LLMs. I'm not sure how confident I am here, but it really wouldn't surprise me if LLMs could both generate and explain remarkably complex perl code!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com