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Comment by makomk | Hacker News Reader

I think Perl has already reached the state where it's mostly used in legacy code, at least for web development.

What about Catalyst? Or Mojolicious? Or Dancer? If it's just used in legacy code, why are there still healthy frameworks being produced (granted, these aren't as popular as Rails, but, Perl on the web is hardly in legacy mode)?

I personally haven't seen any new code being written in Perl during either my time in England or in the Bay Area. I don't really see a reason to use Perl when there are languages like Python and Ruby out there with easier learning curves and which are just as, if not more powerful (would be happy to learn some good reasons, though).

I am in Manchester. I write new Perl code. Python is Perl with a little nicer syntax and a shitload of baggage from overly opinionated people. Ruby is Perl with a little nicer syntax and no other advantages.

I have found no compelling reason to switch, and lots of annoyances that don't seem to exist in Perl.

Following this logic, every language is Perl with a bit of this or that. Perl was one of the first of the kind, but people saw obvious problems with it and so they innovated with 'little nicer syntax' or 'little better object system'. You might not want any of this, but you can't deny most people are happier with Python or Ruby.

This is true for all language that do things right the first time.

If you learn C well, everything else(C based languages) look the very same.

Perl enjoys that first movers advantage.

There was a talk by Guido Van Rossum effectively saying that Perl, Python and Ruby are the same language.

You're not wrong, but I wrote that from my perspective, as someone who primarily writes Perl and needs a compelling reason to switch. Obviously someone who was writing code pre-Perl will probably see things a different way.

I'd say it's more like Perl is every language with a bit of this or that. A sufficiently "skilled" Perl hacker can write everything from bad C, to bad Lisp, to bad Fortran, in Perl -- and most certainly can write plenty of bad Perl in Perl, too. It's writing good Perl that's hard.

Having written some Python I agree. Having written a lot of Ruby I disagree.

I'm actually a big fan of Perl, but your characterization of Ruby is wrong. Ruby is Perl with object-orientation first, nicer syntax is a minor detail after that.

If Ruby has nice syntax then Smalltalk should be the syntax of the Gods ;)

Remember we are comparing to Perl ;)

The language of the Gods is clearly Lisp. Unfortunately it's such a pain to work in that most of the time the Gods just use Perl anyway. Oblig. XKCD: http://xkcd.com/224/

Ruby also now has a VM, which people may or may not find more useful. I for one prefer Ruby 1.9.x to 1.8.x.

It's the only major detail to me, because I can do the majority of what I would use in Ruby, in Perl. Nicer syntax is something I can't do though.

See the CPAN module Moops.

I'm thinking more of things like the p6 arrow. Moops is part of the first part, things I can already do in Perl that are in Ruby.

If you can constrain yourself a reasonable OO system in Perl why can't you constrain yourself to a nice subset of the syntax?

I can, I can deal with overly verbose maps or shifting variables off @_ but Ruby provides some similar features to Perl 6 right now. That is an advantage on its part. It's just not compelling enough to make me switch as Perl can do most of the rest just fine.

Can you elaborate on Python's baggage? I'm simply curious.

I wouldn't characterise myself as any sort of expert so really I'm just talking about minor things like ternary operators, ugliness with super, scoping, the annoyance of PEP8 being overly specific etc. Just decisions taken for the sake of 'correctness' that end up being annoying.

Python isn't so bad, decorators and importing is all very swanky. I find that in general though things tend to be less elegant than intended but the delusion of perfection is maintained. I oppose Python's core philosophy and having used a bunch of Django, that also soured me a bit.

By this measure, C, or C++, or Ruby must be dead, since I've not seen any new code written in it during my 13 years in the industry.

That said, I suspect there are fewer people picking up Perl for the first time for a project these days. My experience with it has always been driven by some degree of "legacy"--someone on the team has experience with the language, and has leveraged CPAN to solve problems. Perl is still my go-to "glue" and tooling language, but that's just because what I know. Would Ruby work? Yeah, probably, but I've not found it to be worth it to learn that language yet.

I see C and Ruby code being written every day in San Francisco.

So the bellwether of a language's health is whether it is being used in San Francisco?

To be fair I see C and C++ used all over the place. Pretty much any game out there has at worst a 50% chance of being written in C++. C is less common, but is still used quite extensively in the open source world. Most devices with firmware are written in C (or at least their drivers are).

>>easier learning curves and which are just as, if not more powerful (would be happy to learn some good reasons, though).

This may be true for Ruby to some extent.

But Python as a design goal aims to provide as little power to the programmer as possible. In fact, the Zen of Python says almost anything that comes in the way should and must be sacrificed to achieve readability.

One can probably write a book on why one must use Perl. In short, nothing really gets work done as Perl does. That one fact hasn't changed since the past 26 years of Perl's existence.

What does power represent to you? Simplicity and readability offer power as far as I'm concerned.

In that case Assembly language programming should be sufficient right? That's as simple and readable as it can get.

Except for the cognitive load you have to keep in your head.

Just because Perl can parse line noise, doesn't mean you can't write readable code. I have seen very unreadable code in Python.

Just ask http://www.builtinperl.com/ for the reasons why. For exemple don't you know that DuckDuckGo is using a lot of Perl ?

Another one, that is huge : YouPorn (itself) is using Catalyst. YOU-PORN!

In my opinion, the main Perl's strength is the cpan.org :

  Stop reinventing wheels, start building space rockets
  
  The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) 
  currently has 128,529 Perl modules in 28,883
  distributions, written by 11,129 authors, 
  mirrored on 266 servers.
  
  The archive has been online since October 
  1995 and is constantly growing.

Actually youporn, rewrote all their code in PHP:

http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/4/2/youporn-targeting-2...

Damned ! Here is an information that should be uploaded to Wikipedia.

>What about Catalyst? Or Mojolicious? Or Dancer?

Yes, what about them? First time I heard of them, and I frequent more than 5 tech sites such as HN.

>If it's just used in legacy code, why are there still healthy frameworks being produced

Because it's very easy to produce a web framework, everybody and his dog has created one (that, or a blog engine). That doesn't make those freameworks "healthy").

NYC financial firms are starting new projects all of the time where Perl is the main tool for feeding information here from over there.

For any categorical statement like that, there will be hold-out niches where it doesn't apply yet. Hell, I'm sure there are some banking types who are starting new projects in COBOL.

Except that programming is such a large domain, you could easily classify web development as a niche itself.

Vast majority of the programming community doesn't have to ever deal with a HTML tag ever.

Which financial firms? Citations? What are they doing? Sorry guys but if they are doing finance systems with perl that's a fraud.

Internal reporting for example. Perl is often used as a "glue" between different systems.

I work at a Perl based startup and we're writing new code and designing new systems all the time. There seems to be quite a few Perl shops in LA though most of them have been around for a long time.

Perl's my mother tongue (started in bioinformatics) but I've been doing a lot of Ruby at my current gig in LA. That being said, I miss Perl's syntax and autovivification. I did a hackathon project with Perl at work, and my punishment for winning was porting it to Java for production.

Drop me a line Moto7451, I'm always interested in meeting local (Perl) hackers.

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