Symbiosis of Docker and Perl [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: Symbiosis of Docker and Perl [video]

#11

Post by throwaway7645 » Sat, Nov 26, 2016, 10:02 PM UTC

Thaxll wrote: post #8

Well I don't want to be the one to say it but Perl is pretty much dead, it has been replaced by Python in the last 8years or so.

A common observation, but I'm not sure how true it is. Python has much more share on things like reddit and on the TIOBE rankings, but it too is dead. Nobody likes Python3 which broke backwards compatibility for Unicode and is significantly slower than 2.x. None of the plans to JIT it have taken off. It doesn't scale. Perl isn't really any better here, but Perl6 is a completely different language than Perl5 that fixes many pain points and if ever successfully optimized might end up being the one scripting language to rule them all ;) (it has a bumpy road though). TLDR: Python has a lot of share, but no real future. It's not dead, but a dead-end (same as Perl5 long-term, but for now it is surprisingly active and well supported). Lots of new projects are done in Perl5 btw. One I'm particularly excited about is TauStation (SciFi text MMORPG).

Re: Symbiosis of Docker and Perl [video]

#12

Post by ende » Sat, Nov 26, 2016, 11:20 PM UTC

I don't use Perl much these days, but 10 years ago I would have really benefited from containerization of Perl code. That said, Perl really does become rather unmanageable for any sizable project, and was probably best used as a light weight scripting language with a great regex engine. For that limited type of use case, https://perlbrew.pl is a very handy tool.

On a semi-related note about Perl and later technologies, I was somewhat surprised Perl didn't receive more of a second wind from the early Hadoop days with 'hadoop streaming'. It seems they would have complemented each other well.

(edit: added that last paragraph)

Re: Symbiosis of Docker and Perl [video]

#13

Post by imglorp » Sat, Nov 26, 2016, 11:55 PM UTC

mhd wrote: post #10

JadeNB wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microservices are rarely extraction or reporting Perl is just Perl now, just as LISP is now just Lisp; Perl is not, if it ever was, the "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language", any more than Lisp is now "LISt Processing".

And if we're talking about the other version of the acronym, then Perl is ideal for webservices and related technologies. Listing rubbish is what a lot of the modern web seems all about.

That, and swiss army chainsaw.

Re: Symbiosis of Docker and Perl [video]

#14

Post by greglindahl » Sun, Nov 27, 2016, 12:22 AM UTC

ende wrote: post #12

I don't use Perl much these days, but 10 years ago I would have really benefited from containerization of Perl code. That said, Perl really does become rather unmanageable for any sizable project, and was probably best used as a light weight scripting language with a great regex engine. For that limited type of use case, https://perlbrew.pl is a very handy tool. On a semi-related note about Perl and later technologie…

You might want to check out one of the companies that has a large codebase in perl. blekko managed to build a nosql database and a million-line search engine without much technical trouble.