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

Ask HN: Is Perl dead?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 140 posts

Re: Ask HN: Is Perl dead?

#61

Post by rcfox »

philwelch wrote: post #17

Perl 5 is mature, and Perl 6 is pre-release, but they're different languages with the same name for branding purposes. Perl 6 is a really promising language with tons of cool features, and some similarities to Perl 5. It will pick up hype when it's 100% finalized, even though you can use it now. Perl 5 (popularly known as "Perl") is old enough to be on the other side of "cool", but it's a perfectly good language, esp…

Perl 5 came out in 1994, Ruby came out in 1995, Python came out in 1991. (Sources: Wikipedia)

Re: Ask HN: Is Perl dead?

#62

Post by loumf »

Duck Duck Go has a lot of perl in it, and it's a somewhat trendy discussion topic on HN.

I think most of the reason we don't care is because DDG's strengths have nothing to do with Perl -- except for maybe how easy it is to deploy/keep running and regular expressions.

Re: Ask HN: Is Perl dead?

#63

Post by lincolnq »

leif wrote: post #40
jlees wrote: post #13

FYI, I use Perl extensively for text file parsing and processing Yeah, me too, but that's the issue. It's great at that. Great at quick and dirty command line hacks. Hell, most of my PhD code was written in Perl. (Something I take a perverse satisfaction in.) But it's not great for rapid webapp development, it's probably harder to hire people, there are fewer libraries and interfaces and open source toolkits, etc - s…

> from Perl to Python (it's a really easy jump) I disagree. Python is incredibly restrictive when you're used to perl. I would be so frustrated if I went that direction.

Odd. Around 2004, I switched from Perl to Python for all the same tasks, and I barely noticed: it was a matter of weeks before I was just as fluent in Python as I had been in Perl. What's your experience been like?

Re: Ask HN: Is Perl dead?

#64

Post by lelele »

The bad news is that Perl isn't dead for sure. Languages tend to stick around for a while.

For myself, I regret all the time I've spent learning and using it. Perl and C++ are languages for those who don't know better. I know because I've used both extensively. Powerful text handling facilities? Perl? You are kidding: Emacs Lisp burns it with a blow.

Now down-vote me like ants gone mad. If you have less than ten years of experience "struggling" with code, and you haven't learned a bunch of languages beyond mainstream ones, then you just can't understand.

> A current example is the "Who's hiring" thread which is now on HN: Most of the requirements are C/C++/Java/PHP/Python/Ruby, and almost none are for Perl.

C/C++/Java/PHP/Python/Ruby? Really? I was expecting HNers to be a little more innovative.

Re: Ask HN: Is Perl dead?

#65

Post by nprincigalli »

zephyrfalcon wrote: post #33

For what it's worth, a quick search on dice.com gives the following: - perl: 4448 results - python: 1988 - ruby: 1087 So I don't know... apparently there are still many jobs out there that require Perl. It may be that people use it less for new projects, though.

Here's a graph with postings for jobs.perl.org from jan/2002 to aug/2010:

http://bit.ly/bFuh7x

(source http://jobs.perl.org/about/stats)

Re: Ask HN: Is Perl dead?

#66

Post by zepolen »

Goladus wrote: post #48
lsc wrote: post #14

amongst webapp developers, yeah. But amongst SysAdmins? Python still has a long ways to go before it reaches the stability of perl, though it's gaining. Also, CPAN is awesome. I don't know of another language that has a cpan-like tool that measures up to CPAN. SysAdmins are slow to discard a good tool; hell, some of us still use bash. Perl 5 has been dominant for most of my career in this arena, and things will be qu…

Funny, I find Python to be more stable than Perl, the one that needs multiple versions on the same system, and the one with modules that fail to compile without tweaking compiler flags.

I love Python and it's my first choice for most projects, but to say that there isn't a problem with lib versioning in Python is just plain ignorant.

Re: Ask HN: Is Perl dead?

#67

Post by prodigal_erik »

KaeseEs wrote: post #39
jlees wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Observe the vague handwavy terms I used: I'm about 18 months out of date as I made the switch to Python around the start of 09. At the time, Catalyst was very unfriendly (a quick google - it still is) and nowhere near as rapid-accessible as Django, just because of the amount of head-twisting you have to do to get things up and running. It may have changed, but frankly I have little interest in investigating it, and I…

He's referring to Moose, which is an insanely good object system, which wasn't prevalent at all 18 months ago but is nearly de rigueur in all but a handful of cases today. It's a mashup of CLOS, Perl 6, Smalltalk and a few other things that remains consistent, Perlish and intuitive. It's also crazy extensible - just look at the MooseX namespace on CPAN to see what I mean.

How much of CPAN has been migrated to Moose, as opposed to directly calling "bless" as the docs[1] advocate even now? As I understand it, the story on interop between the two styles is "don't go there".

[1]http://perldoc.perl.org/perlobj.html

Re: Ask HN: Is Perl dead?

#68

Post by philwelch »

rcfox wrote: post #61
philwelch wrote: post #17

Perl 5 is mature, and Perl 6 is pre-release, but they're different languages with the same name for branding purposes. Perl 6 is a really promising language with tons of cool features, and some similarities to Perl 5. It will pick up hype when it's 100% finalized, even though you can use it now. Perl 5 (popularly known as "Perl") is old enough to be on the other side of "cool", but it's a perfectly good language, esp…

Perl 5 came out in 1994, Ruby came out in 1995, Python came out in 1991. (Sources: Wikipedia)

Perls 1-4 are even older (Perl 1 was 1987). Perl 5 really is just another version number of Perl, not a new language entirely like Perl 6.

Oftentimes what matters is exposure more than when something was invented. Erlang and Haskell came out in 1986 and 1990, respectively, but they're newer to most people than Perl is. Ruby and Python didn't have the exposure in 1995 and 1991 that Perl had.

(Interesting thought experiment--are there any obscure programming langauges today that will be all the rage in 2020, or has the internet accelerated that process?)

Re: Ask HN: Is Perl dead?

#69

Post by kmg »

As strlen already mentioned perl is big in the e-mail and infrastructure world. I write perl code for our e-mail filter and/or infrastructure frequently. But our webui is developed is developed in rails and qooxdoo. So I guess, it boils down to right tool for the job and trends of the day.

Re: Ask HN: Is Perl dead?

#70

Post by berntb »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #67
KaeseEs wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's referring to Moose, which is an insanely good object system, which wasn't prevalent at all 18 months ago but is nearly de rigueur in all but a handful of cases today. It's a mashup of CLOS, Perl 6, Smalltalk and a few other things that remains consistent, Perlish and intuitive. It's also crazy extensible - just look at the MooseX namespace on CPAN to see what I mean.

How much of CPAN has been migrated to Moose, as opposed to directly calling "bless" as the docs[1] advocate even now? As I understand it, the story on interop between the two styles is "don't go there". [1] http://perldoc.perl.org/perlobj.html

The perlobj perldoc is about the old style OO -- and discusses the old style OO... :-) It doesn't discuss any CPAN modules at all (there are quite a lot about OO). Are you trolling?

What problems do you mean with Moose and the blessed OO?

Post reply on HN