
Perl Is Back and Ready to Roll with the Big Data Crowd - joabj
http://thenewstack.io/perl-back-ready-roll-big-data/
======
moonbug
Too late.

~~~
islandtech
Hardly. Perl gets far more use than you might imagine and in some very
interesting places. Anyone who thinks that Perl is dead or dying is a
bandwagon fan of the language(s) du jour.

I've been in IT across three decades. Perl is just as useful to me today as it
was whilst in college. Just because it isn't in use by all the sock-headed
millennial hipsters doesn't mean a thing. I can do more with Perl in fewer
lines and with less thought than with Python or Ruby. I like Perl's syntax and
I like that it allows me to work with it in a way that works for me. Other
languages are not so forgiving in this regard.

Look at the usefulness of CPAN. Perl 6 is analagous to Python 3. It's a
different language more or less, but given a bit of time, Perl 6 will be used
more and more. I already know people using it. I plan to use it more and more.
There are huge swaths of the Internet still built on Perl.

~~~
moonbug
Similarly, I've two decades of Perl under my belt and it remains my go-to to
quick-and-dirties. But in my field, Python has the mind-share these days and
ease of collaboration beats language puritanism, so Perl's on a one-way trip.
The reality is that when people leave Perl, they don't come back.

~~~
islandtech
I hear you, but do you really think the people who spent the last decade+
working on Perl 6 would have done so because of love of the language alone?
That would be a terrible waste of time and talent. I think we will see
something of a Perl revival when people see just what they can do with Perl 6.
I'm hopeful, but at the same time, you yourself know how useful Perl can be
for things like one-liner quick, clever hacks and even better yet, I don't
think anything beats Perl for rapid prototyping, even if it means the final
product is written in C/C++.

