hi, i was interested if perl is still relevant in this day and age. Perl has been on the decline for a very long time now. Perl 6 (now named 'raku) not being backwards compatible with perl 5 code made the already small perl community even smaller by splitting it in half. A good example is lisp with it’s thousands of different dialects.
Is it still worth using or is it bound to legacy software forever? Like cobol.
For me, Python replaced Perl 15 years ago. I know Perl is a great language, but it’s too “write-only.” Python replaced both BASIC and Perl at the same time, even with the problems of migration from v2 to v3. Python can also do scripts to replace Bash and PowerShell. I don’t see myself learning Perl now, it would be a waste of time.
Perl was revolutionary at the time with CGI and regexes, but it’s not needed anymore.
I wish python was not indentation aware. It has discouraged me from learning it.
Edit: downvoted by fanbois. Look, I’m not married to my tools.
Even if you’re writing JavaScript, you should be using proper indentation. What an odd thing to keep you from learning it.
I write code, indentation is something that the editor just does automatically. If I want to change indent settings I just mark the complete buffer, press tab, and magic happens.
I’ve been using python for various stuff for a few years now as well, and the indent thing still annoys me.
Sometimes I want to write a quick oneliner or a quick algorithm to test things out. Or not worry about indentation when trying a solution I might discard in five minutes.
With Python, I don’t have that choice.
If it is actually a single line ID argue that you do.
Single line ID? What do you mean?
Edit: I got it now.
So I can place multiple for loops and conditional statements in one single line in Python?
List comprehension can actually do that, yes. This is one of the scripting aspects of python I use most commonly, and is probably one of its best-known features for creating “one liners”.
I read about it since I was curious. It seems like you have to craft your code in a certain way for it to be a one-liner. Whereas with many other languages, you don’t need to do such a thing. You just put everything in one line and off you go.
Having said that, from a challenge-seeking perspective, writing python oneliners sound fun (I really mean this.)
I think it’s an autocorrect typo. Should be: If it is actually a single line, I’d argue that you do.
Thanks.
Things get messy though, when you have to break the rules of indentation once in a while or when you have “improper “ indentation. Whitespace is a stupidly messy thing. Indentation should be a style guide, not part of the language semantics.
No, it really is horrible. I’m an old timer who learned on FORTRAN and other languages that were still suffering from the punchcard era. Making logic based on character positioning, and adding unnecessary restriction, is just so frustrating and tedious. We got away from such constraints by the 1990’s. Let’s not go back.
Sure enough, my kid’s Comp Sci teacher tried to use Python because he read how easy it is to use, but no one succeeded because of the formatting. No one succeeded except my kid, who also became a rock star by helping kids reformat. Anyhow, back when computers were primitive and limited, such restrictions were understandable. They’re not anymore.
Currently I’m a fan of Groovy. All the capability of Java without silly requirements like semi-colons. All the simplicity of Python without silly formatting restrictions
If that’s your only reason, I’d encourage to try it anyway. Logical indentation is initially weird but it can be overcome very fast.
I might! Thanks.
It has never been an issue for me in 20 years. If you move code, you cut a whole paragraph, paste, and indent appropriately.
If I move code in non-python code, I cut a whole paragraph, paste, and I’m done if that’s all I wanted to do.
Your code won’t be indented properly, same problem as Python unless you have a formatting tool in your setup.
It won’t matter. It will still compile correctly every time, as opposed to python, and that’s my point. Choice. Choice is the key here.
Python isn’t (generally) compiled. Have you used python before?
I know Python is interpreted, but regardless, my point still stands. Just replace compile with run correctly.
That is a bizarre opinion.
Nope. It isn’t.
I wish python was not indentation aware. It has discouraged me from learning it.
lol, then you just don’t like Python. You can’t disassociate the two things.
Yup, I don’t like it because of it.
You flat out haven’t used it.
Correct. I don’t think we’re disagreeing. The language has one deal-breaker to me and that’s all I need to know.
That’s like saying “you won’t be friends with Bob because he’s likes to go to smoking-friendly places all the time and you don’t? BUT YOU DON’T KNOW THE GUY!!!”
I wish python was not indentation aware
You don’t like your good ol’ COBOL??
:-)
Is COBOL indentation aware?
To the extreme :-)
Today I learned. Thanks!
It’s punch card-column aware, if you’re talking about that.
Perl is great for that occasional bash one liner or that one off script.
It’s awful for team projects. The core mantra of Perl is “there’s more than one way to do it”, meaning every piece of code can be written in hundreds of different ways. Result is that everybody write with different code styles, and no one can understand each other’s code.
So that rules out most practical use cases.
I write Perl at work. Supporting an actively developed Perl based application.
It’s honestly not that bad as a language, the biggest downside is that the ecosystem of libraries around it are often abandoned or outdated. The language isn’t perfect and it needs a bit of discipline to avoid creating unreadable code, but honestly it’s not as bad as its reputation might have you believe.
It has quite a few tricks and unexpected bits of flexibility that make it quite a bit more expressive than other languages - you can really craft nice compact, elegant code with it if you want to.
These days I use other languages too (Python, Ruby, JS, etc) but none of them quite match Perl for expressiveness.
Oh also it’s great for oneliners. That expressiveness can be abused for brevity in some really interesting ways.
unexpected bits of flexibility
The worst one I stumbled across while reading a colleagues script was the three separate namespaces for symbols of type scalar, array, and hash.
You mean the fact that you can have a hash called %foo, an array called @foo and a scalar called $foo all at the same time? I agree that’s a weird choice and there’s potential for insanity there, but it’s pretty easy to just not do that…
20+ years of Perl experience and while Perl has a load of idiosyncrasies that make it harder to work with than other languages, I don’t think that particular one has ever caused a significant problem.
You mean the fact that you can have a hash called %foo, an array called @foo and a scalar called $foo all at the same time?
Yes, exactly. Those definitions aren’t clashing, so they must have separate namespaces.
it’s pretty easy to just not do that…
I wouldn’t do that either, but my colleage apparently did. So far I’m having a harder time reading perl than writing it.
The way it works is that there’s a symbol table entry for “foo” which has a slot for a hash, scalar, array, glob, etc.
That leads to some super weird behaviour like, for example, if I declare a scalar, hash and array as “x”:
$x = "sy"; %x = (foo => "mb"); @x = ("ol", "s!");You can access them all independently as you’re aware:
say "x: ", $x, $x{foo}, @x; # Outputs: x: symbols!But what’s really going to bake your noodle is I can assign the “x” symbol to something else like this:
*z = *x;…and then the same thing works with z:
say "z: ", $z, $z{foo}, @z; # Outputs: z: symbols!Oneliner if you want to try it:
perl -E '$x = "sy"; %x = (foo => "mb"); @x = ("ol", "s!"); say "x: ", $x, $x{foo}, @x; *z = *x; say "z: ", $z, $z{foo}, @z;'Congratulations! You now know more about one of Perl’s really weird internals than I’d wager most Perl programmers (I have literally never used any of the above for anything actually productive!)
Do you work for booking.com? Only place I’ve seen that advertises the fact they run on a perl codebase
Nope. But I know a bunch of people that do or have, and have interviewed several (it’s a pretty small sector!)
Perl hasn’t lost any of it’s qualities or relevance or usefulness.
It’s just, with these incompatible language upgrades, they are creating artificial barriers for starters and for occasional users. The outcome is that they are making it less popular, sadly.
Its qualities*
Thank you for your service
Which incompatible language upgrades? Are you talking about Perl 6?
That was never really an iteration of Perl, and it was renamed Raku some years back so is no longer named like it’s an iteration of Perl.
Perl continues as Perl 5 and honestly values compatibility extremely highly, probably more than many (most?) other languages. There have been a handful of breaking changes over the years (most notable for me was the hash key ordering thing) but those are usually security related rather than anything else.
The community is all but gone at this point. It used to have a lot of highly concentrated competance. Many of those people left (or were driven away) in the last few years, and nobody is taking their place.
There is no such thing as a junior Perl programmer.
My company still uses it significantly, and has already had one major failed attempt to get rid of it. I expect we’ll still have it for years to come. I’m at least 25 years away from retirement, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was still around then. That said, we’re moving to Elixir, and with a much better plan than the previous attempt.
All that said, we gobble up all the experienced Perl devs we can and try to make them happy enough to stay. There’s good money to be made in a long-tail language.
I work at a small company that still uses perl for everything. It works, the company makes money. They’ll never move off it. I bet there’s a lot of little places like that, but I doubt many are starting new projects with it. Not many of the major modules have a lot of updates recently, but they’ve also been pretty complete for a long time. If you already know shell/awk/grep/etc it’s pretty easy to pick up. Probably will see less and less of it as the people that do write in it continue to age.
Personally, I never figured out awk and sed, and only the basics of heel because I’ll just use Perl if I need and if the things those tools do.
You can do cool and complex stuff with it (I have), but it’s really unparalleled for folding, stapling, and mutilating text in a CLI environment.
Is Raku really used as much as perl? Splitting the community in half is quite the claim…
OpenQa testing framework still uses perl heavily.
I learned perl after python and I still like the language. At the end I always treat languages as tools. There is no bad language. There is only a task and your decision to pick the correct tool for it.
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The illegible code claim has always baffled me.
You can write perfectly legible code in perl. You can write illegible code in python if you really want to.
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Define “people”. People you work with? Old codebases from your workplace?
Well, from my experience, people don’t write illegible perl code.
You can write illegible code in any language.
The variable prefixes make it easy in Perl to write line noise, and there are much more “magical defaults”.
What’s the most illegible code you have found in Python?
How is type information noise instead of a helpful feature?
I haven’t looked for illegible Python code out there.
Writing legible Perl code is the complete antithesis of what the language was created for. This comment shows a complete misunderstanding of Larry Wall’s work.
Lol what are you talking about?! What is this LW’s point you’re referring to? “Write non-readable code, everyone”?
I’m guessing you’re referring to him saying “there’s more than one way to do things”, and that’s not mutually exclusive from writing legible code.
There’s an obfuscated C contest too - no one ever assumed that K&R opposed highly legible code. I seem to recall that Kerrigan actually wrote some books to the contrary.
That’s a non-argument, man. You just linked to a contest.
That’s like saying that the FAA endorses unsafe airplane building practices because they hold a contest about unmanned cardboard made planes that fly the most length in a desert without crashing.
I use perl for automation stuff that needs more than bash, but doesn’t require the speed of a faster/compiled language. In my opinion it’s great for that kind of thing.
I know of at least one big online company that still has a staggering amount of perl in their stack for 2023 (IMO)
I played around with Perl when I was still in school, almost 20 years ago. Even then it was pretty legacy. I remember fixing a bug in a Perl script during an internship, because I was literally the only person in the whole department who could understand Perl code. I suppose it was used for sysadmin and web scripting but has since been replaced by PHP, Javascript and Python. I wouldn’t bet any money on Perl being relevant in the future.
It was used for everything in the late 90’s. I get nostalgic when I see a bit of perl on the web these days, but I sure don’t miss it.
Its* thousands of different dialects.
It’s “its”, not “it’s”, unless you mean “it is”, in which case it is “it’s “.
Back in the days when we actually used usenet for discussion, there was a newsgroup called alt.possessive.its.has.no.apostrophe. Ah the olde internet.
I still use Perl for most things – it’s my go-to language when I have to get something done quickly. And quickly doesn’t have to mean small one-liner scripts.
My biggest reason for using it is that mod_perl is still blazingly fast.
