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Perl 5.26.0 released

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Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#3
Guys I am genuinely asking this and I have zero intent on bashing on Perl. What is the position of Perl industry right now? how much it can compete with Python. Where does it compete? is it on losing side ?

P.S. I am student and I have no real perspective on what is going on in industry right now.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#4
post #2

Wow, I haven't looked at Perl in a while, but all sorts of numbers mentioned in the announcement really surprise me. Btw., as mentioned in announcement. The actual changes are here, if you missed that: https://metacpan.org/pod/release/XSAWYERX/perl-5.26.0/pod/pe...

Yes, impressive community effort for a language that... Well... I have heard nothing good about in any "at the water cooler" conversation that I was ever in, over the past fifteen years or so. Except, of course, that Perl is awesome at regular expressions, an advantage that most languages must have caught up on, no? Not for nothing Perl shows up in most hated-lists all around town (top 10 at Stack Overflow).

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#5
post #3

Guys I am genuinely asking this and I have zero intent on bashing on Perl. What is the position of Perl industry right now? how much it can compete with Python. Where does it compete? is it on losing side ? P.S. I am student and I have no real perspective on what is going on in industry right now.

Companies who are already using a technology such as Perl usually already have both some senior people who only know that technology and/or have a big codebase on that, such that migrating the code would take considerable resources.

Basically, sometimes it's not a choice.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#6
post #3

Guys I am genuinely asking this and I have zero intent on bashing on Perl. What is the position of Perl industry right now? how much it can compete with Python. Where does it compete? is it on losing side ? P.S. I am student and I have no real perspective on what is going on in industry right now.

The only big company I know that uses Perl extensively is booking.com, and I think that has more to do with any technical merit from the language, and just that is what they started and it was working for them.

To be honest, I think Perl still powers a whole lot of systems, and certainly is a powerful tool for someone who is a Unix sysadmin, but this kind of job is dying. And as a language, I think Perl has nothing on Python or even Ruby, or even PHP nowadays.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#7
post #2

Wow, I haven't looked at Perl in a while, but all sorts of numbers mentioned in the announcement really surprise me. Btw., as mentioned in announcement. The actual changes are here, if you missed that: https://metacpan.org/pod/release/XSAWYERX/perl-5.26.0/pod/pe...

Yes, impressive community effort for a language that... Well... I have heard nothing good about in any "at the water cooler" conversation that I was ever in, over the past fifteen years or so. Except, of course, that Perl is awesome at regular expressions, an advantage that most languages must have caught up on, no? Not for nothing Perl shows up in most hated-lists all around town (top 10 at Stack Overflow).

Perl is still awesome at regular expressions compared to other languages. It has better Unicode regex support than almost any other language. If you need to do intricate Unicode regexes, then your main choices are Perl and libraries for other languages which port Perl features, not always well-supported.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#8
Reading through the changes it becomes abvious how rich a language Perl is. Just look at all the edge cases and fine tunings that this long time of development and improvement has generated. Its impressive. Anyone starting their own little programming language should really consider how big a task that actually is. This is not to stop anyone or discourage them.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#9
post #3

Guys I am genuinely asking this and I have zero intent on bashing on Perl. What is the position of Perl industry right now? how much it can compete with Python. Where does it compete? is it on losing side ? P.S. I am student and I have no real perspective on what is going on in industry right now.

Honestly, you are asking the wrong question. How can two turing complete programming languages even "compete"? I though about this a long time and came to the conclusion that it's not worth the effort to come up with an answer unless objective metrics are beeing found.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#10
post #6
post #3

Guys I am genuinely asking this and I have zero intent on bashing on Perl. What is the position of Perl industry right now? how much it can compete with Python. Where does it compete? is it on losing side ? P.S. I am student and I have no real perspective on what is going on in industry right now.

The only big company I know that uses Perl extensively is booking.com, and I think that has more to do with any technical merit from the language, and just that is what they started and it was working for them. To be honest, I think Perl still powers a whole lot of systems, and certainly is a powerful tool for someone who is a Unix sysadmin, but this kind of job is dying. And as a language, I think Perl has nothing o…

Why do you think unix sysadmin function is dying? Just curious.
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