
Show HN: I Wrote a Book: Minimum Viable Perl - kablamo
http://mvp.kablamo.org/
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thedirt0115
Nice work, I like it! It's like Learn X in Y Minutes, but with some more
depth..

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kablamo
Thanks! Thats exactly what I was aiming for. I'm glad that came across. I was
thinking the same thing although I didn't actually discover
[https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/perl/](https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/perl/)
until after I had written Minimum Viable Perl.

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yodon
Do people still use Perl? Why and where?

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thedirt0115
Yes, there are several legacy systems where a full rewrite is way more risky
than maintenance-and-minor-enhancements-only. If you're surprised that Perl is
still alive, don't go asking about how many COBOL systems are still out there!

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yodon
I was more curious whether people are still using Perl on new projects and if
so why they choose to do so.

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throwaway7645
This gets asked a fair amount on r/perl and on here. In short, because it's
still a great language with yearly releases and a large library ecosystem
(CPAN). It's built in to Linux and works really well there (although Python is
as well), but also you can generally run 20 year old perl code in a 5.26
distribution of Perl without much issue. Performance is really good too. I'd
say it's harder to learn than Python if you had to pick one, but if you're
already good with Perl, there's really not a reason to go to Python unless you
need to do numerical work (numpy/scypy) or data work (Pandas & Matplotlib).
Perl has 3 good web frameworks. The language's base OO support is pretty
sparse, but the Moose module on CPAN allows Perl to become supercharged with
very advanced OO capabilities and the Moo module is a lightweight version of
Moose that is a lower performance hit. Perl is much better than Python or Ruby
for shell one-liners to do quick and dirty work as it has a lot of things
built in to help there (see book Perl Oneliners). They spent 15 years
designing Perl6 which is not the next language, but a new sister language that
still has some work in the performance department, but is a very nice
language. As a python guy, I would switch to Perl6 in a heartbeat if it were
as fast as Perl5. A lot of things from Perl6 were backported to Perl5. All in
all, y not choose it? It has a lot of neat developer tools as well.

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microwavecamera
> unless you need to do numerical work (numpy/scypy) or data work (Pandas &
> Matplotlib)

Perl has libraries for numerical/science stuff too. :)

[http://pdl.perl.org](http://pdl.perl.org)

[http://search.cpan.org/dist/Math-GSL](http://search.cpan.org/dist/Math-GSL)

[http://bioperl.org](http://bioperl.org)

Those are some of the major ones. Being Perl, of course there's more.

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throwaway7645
Bioperl is specific to biology/genomics to my knowledge although you could
probably use it for other tasks. I'd use PDL if it had more use and support
and was easier to setup, but it's a pain in that regard. I've tried installing
it on windows via strawberry perl & activestate and won't be trying again
after the 1/2 hour install repeatedly failed tests.

