

Ask HN: Is Perl making a comeback? - shadowcats

For years, there were pretty much zero articles about Perl posted here. Even Java received more linkage.<p>Recently, I&#x27;m seeing a small trickle of Perl posts, which makes me wonder if this is the beginning of a new trend.<p>Is Perl making a comeback?
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danhoc01
I was a Perl hacker for almost three years. It was my first dynamic,
interpreted language and is what made me fall in love with writing software.
Writing Perl was when I first felt that I was hacking rather than programming.

The largest problem is that it's largely unreadable, a write-only language.
There's too much magic in Perl. Perl 6 is making strides to correct this, but
the culture of Perl is what makes me believe that it will never be a viable
choice over other dynamic, interpreted languages. I moved to Python and will
never look back. The Perl culture is exactly what lured me in to programming,
so I'd rather it not change anyways.

There are definitely still companies using Perl in production, but my guess is
that it's always for legacy reasons.

~~~
lazyjones
> * the culture of Perl is what makes me believe that it will never be a
> viable choice over other dynamic, interpreted languages.*

What's wrong with Perl culture? Perl as a language and as an implementation
has many weaknesses (esp. maintainability), but I've never seen any reasonable
criticism of its culture as a whole. Only very recently have I noticed a
somewhat annoying trend towards evangelism, I attribute this to the loss of
interest in the language with the exception of somewhat fanatic users. But
most current users are probably still grumpy old men like me who just want to
get work done without rewriting large legacy code bases from scratch.

~~~
danhoc01
Nothing is wrong with culture. I love the culture. It's just that there is an
emphasis on doing things in clever ways, not necessarily readable or
maintainable ways.

The average thread on PerlMonks (at least when I was a heavy reader)
eventually turns to code golf. The language and culture both encourage that. I
had a lot of fun writing clever code, and it really helped me understand data
structures and efficiency at a deep level. Trying to force that culture of
expression and code gymnastics to write a maintainable codebase just isn't
worth it in my opinion. A language with more constraints and less magic will
benefit a team trying to come together to build a product.

I see Python as being somewhere between Perl (express yourself in clever ways)
and Ruby (I know it's attributed to Rails, but omakase) in terms of culture.
That's why I love Python.

~~~
lazyjones
> _The average thread on PerlMonks (at least when I was a heavy reader)
> eventually turns to code golf_

That might not be representative of the Perl community as a whole really ...
Perl is used in corporate environments where "code golf" or "super clever"
solutions will get you odd looks, Perl isn't an excuse for writing
unmaintainable code, even if it's straight from PerlMonks. Books like "Modern
Perl" by chromatic and software like Perl::Critic have moved the focus from
writing "clever" to writing maintainable code in the last couple of years. In
my opinion, it was too little and too late though and lacking supporting
changes in Perl's implementation to reverse the trend (i.e. losing users).

For people who have touched saner languages (like Go) in the mean time, it's
just hopeless to keep messing about with Perl, no matter how disciplined
people are and how supporting the toolchain is (I run Perl::Critic and _perl
-MO=Lint -c_ before every commit and it takes longer than "go build", which
checks code much more thoroughly).

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runjake
For many of us, Perl never went away. Been using it since the early 90s. It's
ugly, but I know it, it does the job well, and it's reliable.

~~~
justinator
Def. never went away. Picked it up in 1999 when working in a web design shop,
still hackin' away at it, on my own.

Still, on the same, evolving code base!

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melling
No, people just started jamming in Perl headlines in the past few days. Anyone
can submit, after all. It's the 3rd most popular dynamic language. One of
Perl's claim's to fame was CPAN, but at this point there's probably more than
enough Python or Ruby library support. Ruby and Python also have also JVM
support. You'll still find Perl in a lot of legacy software because it was
king for a decade. These days, I would probably just go with Python or Ruby on
any new project because it's easier to find developers.

Finally, consider if you want to outsource on oDesk, for example. There's a
better chance of getting readable Python than readable Perl.

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bliti
It never left. You won't read about it here because its not _in_. Remember
that this community revolves around a younger generation of programmers that
learned to build web cruds with rails. Not a bad thing. They just see Perl as
_old_.

~~~
tarpden
Perl 5 maintains that perception because of its refusal to break backward
compatibility and fix longstanding warts.

~~~
chromatic
That was true until about 5.12. Since 2011, Perl's been much more aggressive
about fixing warts and breaking backwards compatibility in intelligent ways
(where it's getting in the way of something better or actively harmful).

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lsiebert
Hacker News represents a VERY small segment of the computer programming
population. That's fine, but don't be confused if the echo chamber
occasionally produces weird results. Perl is still in use in major companies,
for web stuff and system administration, but also game development, hardware
simulation testing and other cool things. It's not sexy, and it seems arcane
to programmers used to more modern languages. But there are things happening
in it.

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arjn
perl is in active use among sysadmin and devops people.

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abvdasker
No.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

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patal
please not

~~~
swuecho
I guess it will be more popular if Perl6 catch up in speed.

