
Perl in 2020: Is It Still Worth Learning Now? - lizmat
https://somedudesays.com/2020/02/perl-in-2020-is-it-still-worth-learning/
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roryrjb
I really like Perl, although unfortunately I don't get to use it much.
Sometimes when I am learning a language or a framework and I start getting the
feel of it, I will try something and sometimes it works or doesn't. Either I
didn't understand it right or maybe the API wasn't designed in the best way,
but with Perl it would usually do what I thought it would do. All those sigils
and context-aware variables really fits my mind and I feel so productive and
happy using Perl. Unfortunately the naming issue feels really detrimental so
it's good that's now behind us. In my opinion Perl is still valid as a general
programming language (the relative lack of built-in OOP is a benefit to me),
but for some things it's the best tool for the job. More generally speaking,
the variety and quality of modules on CPAN is great. You can easily interface
with C (ok maybe not with XS _so_ easily), do some event loop programming,
write one liners, non-GIL threading, FastCGI/PSGI web servers (not to mention
all the nice frameworks such as Mojolicious, Dancer, et al), even CGI via
SlowCGI or fcgiwrap + Nginx/Apache/httpd is still relevant and possible. I
don't have any benchmarks to hand but I'm still under the impression that it's
faster than Python or Ruby, if that's an important consideration. Sometimes
Perl is only used in place of shell scripting itself or as an alternative to
awk and that's OK, definitely still worth learning in 2020.

Edit: I also wanted to add that companies still use it, some more famous names
include Booking.com and DuckDuckGo. It forms the foundation of a lot of Linux
and BSD utilities, Git, it's available out of the box on OpenBSD, 99% of Linux
distributions, macOS Catalina (all of these I know for a fact) and if not
available by default is easily installed or built.

