Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

ostatic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 88 posts

Re: Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

#41

Post by avar »

plinkplonk wrote: post #19
DrSprout wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you just answered your own question. I'd say just about every Unix box on the planet has Perl holding it together somewhere in there. What you've asked is essentially like asking "How does mortar hold buildings together any more than bricks, steel I-beams, or roofing?" These things are equally important, and yes you could probably find a substitute, but why?

"What you've asked is essentially like asking "How does mortar hold buildings together any more than bricks, steel I-beams, or roofing?" Argument by metaphor is a lazy device. I don't see any specific "mortar like" virtues that perl has but other common scripting languages don't. In this metaphor I guess C Code would be the "bricks and steel beams". Why can't I put a unix box together without perl on it? Is there any…

The phrase "Perl holds the internet together" was coined by analogy with Perl's widespread use as a glue language. You've interpreted it too literally. It doesn't mean that you can't set up a router or another piece of Internet infrastructure without using Perl.

It means that Perl is used in a lot of unexpected places, and that a lot of critical things are "held together" by Perl. Even if you think your website is running on Java, some systems administrator probably has a cronjob written in Perl critical to its operation.

Re: Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

#42

Post by sigzero »

gamache wrote: post #34
jergosh wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a rather twisted reasoning, with Perl 6 on the doorstep ;)

Perl 6 is not meant to interoperate directly with Perl 5. It's not an incremental update in any way. IMO, it would be a lot clearer if Perl 6 weren't called Perl.

I agree totally. Perl6 is to Perl5 what VB.NET was to VB6. They aren't the same.

Re: Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

#43

Post by plinkplonk »

mfr wrote: post #39
plinkplonk wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What you've asked is essentially like asking "How does mortar hold buildings together any more than bricks, steel I-beams, or roofing?" Argument by metaphor is a lazy device. I don't see any specific "mortar like" virtues that perl has but other common scripting languages don't. In this metaphor I guess C Code would be the "bricks and steel beams". Why can't I put a unix box together without perl on it? Is there any…

To answer your specific question, it isn't necessary. It's just another Turing-Complete language, right? Perl was one of the first popular scripting languages out there to have well-integrated regex handling and was useful for programming purposes. Most old-school systems and network people not only know how to code their way out of a paper bag, but typically grew up with C and Perl as their two go-to languages. C wh…

" Most old-school systems and network people not only know how to code their way out of a paper bag, but typically grew up with C and Perl as their two go-to languages."

Which is probably why the "new school" systems programmers (many of whom also know how to program their way out of all kinds of bags) choose other scripting languages to go with C. They don't need to know perl any longer for all the tasks you laid out. Which is probably a good thing. The less dependence internet infrastructure has on specific languages the better.

As you correctly said "Perl holds the Internet together for http://redstate.com/historical reasons, " just as COBOL was the primary "business systems" language for a long time for historical reasons.

As someone pointed out above, when people talk about languages "going away" they don't mean that no one works on the language anymore, just that there are better alternatives these days.

Every time someone uses another language for what someone 10 years ago would have needed COBOL for, it fades a little, till there is only legacy codebases and its caretakers keeping the language alive.

I don't think it is that bad for Perl yet, but the trend seems to be in that direction, with more and more people using Python, Ruby (and even PHP) for the tasks Perl would have been the default choice historically.

Re: Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

#44

Post by sigzero »

T_S_ wrote: post #33
btilly wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It said Perl 5.12 because Perl 5.12 was released April 12 this year. However that said, Perl cuts releases of old branches from time to time. So 5.8.9 was released a year after 5.10. See http://search.cpan.org/~jesse/perl-5.12.0/pod/perlhist.pod for a full release history.

Thanks for the update. I stopped using perl around the same time 5.8 was slated to be the last version of perl 5, since perl 6 was coming Real Soon Now. I learned perl in 1996 in order to cobble together a system that collected reports from all sorts of weird text files and formats (anyone remember Framemaker?) and merge them into one nice big postscript file with custom watermarks and page numbers. This program ran…

Did somebody really say "Perl 6 is coming real soon now?" I have only ever seen "by christmas" and they don't mention what year.

Re: Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

#45

Post by bobbyi »

gamache wrote: post #23

Article's conclusion: After a short lapse, Perl development is picking up and enthusiasm for Perl 5 is as strong as ever. I would agree. A little over a decade ago, Perl suffered from the same problems which plagued JavaScript in its early days: ease of writing shitty code, mountains of shitty sample code, and a community which did not vehemently encourage the writing of unshitty code. This caused a backlash which la…

ease of writing shitty code, mountains of shitty sample code, and a community which did not vehemently encourage the writing of unshitty code. This caused a backlash which lasted several years, during which the programming public panned the languages almost universally.

That's not how I remember it. Perl usage started to really fall off when PHP became popular and replaced modperl/ cgi scripts as the common way of throwing together a dynamic webpage. PHP is a language famous for letting people write shitty code and having a "community" that doesn't discourage it.

Re: Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

#46

Post by berntb »

flogic wrote: post #28
jergosh wrote: post #9

The whole article fails to mention any advantage of Perl over the languages it's compared to (wonder why). The sooner Perl falls into obscurity, the better.

That's because Perl Python and Ruby offer essentially the same feature set. The only significant differences are syntax and CPAN.

Well, Perl arguably has a nicer OO system with Moose... :-)

Re: Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

#47

Post by docgnome »

jergosh wrote: post #12
DrSprout wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article still makes an excellent point, which is that the difference between most of the 'newer technologies' and Perl is basically marketing, not any actual superiority of language design. You can write line noise in Perl, but you can also write Python in Perl. It may not be quite as pretty as Python, but as far as use in a production environment it will be equally useful.

Why not just write Python in Python instead ;)?

CPAN. CPAN is fricking awesome.

Re: Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

#48

Post by sabat »

gamache wrote: post #23

Article's conclusion: After a short lapse, Perl development is picking up and enthusiasm for Perl 5 is as strong as ever. I would agree. A little over a decade ago, Perl suffered from the same problems which plagued JavaScript in its early days: ease of writing shitty code, mountains of shitty sample code, and a community which did not vehemently encourage the writing of unshitty code. This caused a backlash which la…

enthusiasm for Perl 5 is as strong as ever

That's probably something of an overstatement, but I've written Perl in the past months for gigs, even though I have long abandoned it for Ruby. I don't know that I'd call the general interest in Perl5 "enthusiasm" -- that's a word I'd save for Ruby/RoR and maybe Python and DJ Ango. ;-p :-)

Perl5 is mature. There are modules for anything you can imagine, and most seem to be well-maintained. It's still useful, if someone antiquated in feel.

Perl6: that's another story. It's DOA. People will point to this implementation and that one, but the lack of a reference implementation, along with the long development time, makes Perl6 the Duke Nukem Forever of scripting.

Re: Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

#49

Post by gamache »

bobbyi wrote: post #45
gamache wrote: post #23

Article's conclusion: After a short lapse, Perl development is picking up and enthusiasm for Perl 5 is as strong as ever. I would agree. A little over a decade ago, Perl suffered from the same problems which plagued JavaScript in its early days: ease of writing shitty code, mountains of shitty sample code, and a community which did not vehemently encourage the writing of unshitty code. This caused a backlash which la…

ease of writing shitty code, mountains of shitty sample code, and a community which did not vehemently encourage the writing of unshitty code. This caused a backlash which lasted several years, during which the programming public panned the languages almost universally. That's not how I remember it. Perl usage started to really fall off when PHP became popular and replaced modperl/ cgi scripts as the common way of th…

Perl usage on the web began to fall off due in part to PHP, but you're neglecting the huge amount of Perl used in text processing, system administration, automation, even the sciences.

PHP is (very mildly) comparable to Perl's Mason template engine, if Mason were the only way to use Perl.

Re: Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

#50

Post by sreque »

plinkplonk wrote: post #25
gamache wrote: post #23

Article's conclusion: After a short lapse, Perl development is picking up and enthusiasm for Perl 5 is as strong as ever. I would agree. A little over a decade ago, Perl suffered from the same problems which plagued JavaScript in its early days: ease of writing shitty code, mountains of shitty sample code, and a community which did not vehemently encourage the writing of unshitty code. This caused a backlash which la…

"Perl development is picking up and enthusiasm for Perl 5 is as strong as ever." I will take your word for it, but I do have to say (speaking as someone with a lot of grey in his hair) that I haven't seen a young developer choose to work primarily in perl (over ruby or Python or Java or C#) in ages. Most new projects/startups don't seem to choose perl as their primary language. I readily concede that this is probably…

Older people use it is because they don't want to change or learn something new. Especially in a company already entrenched in Perl development, their is little benefit to switching to a better language compared to the cost of forcing people to learn a whole new technology stack when they are more than content with Perl. However, new companies are much more free to build on whatever technology stack is most appropriate.

I've also noticed over time that lots of non-CS majors can and do program in scripting languages because they are relatively easy to pick up and get things done with. These people are usually more aligned with an IT career in that scripting constitutes only a fraction of their job. If they happen to learn Perl and PHP first, then that is what they stick with.

These people may like to program, but it is not the favorite part of their job and they have other work activities they enjoy more. More importantly, they know little to nothing about software design principles and are not interested in improving their software development skills. They would rather spend their time learning about something else that interests them more. Therefore, they don't even know how to appreciate the advantages more modern scripting languages offer. To these people, languages like Perl are more than sufficient to get their job done, and they are probably right.

However, as people who know better, I believe we should be encouraging better languages in a friendly way whenever possible. When my IT friends ask me about any questions related to programming, I usually try to point them to Python or Ruby for a solution. If they are asking questions they are probably interested in learning something new!

edit: changed wording based on reply from gamache.

Post reply on HN