Nah Perl just wasn't a very good language. Not every language is equally good.
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Perl's decline was cultural
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Re: Perl's decline was cultural
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perl was (and still is) a very expressive and concise language for working with text and a unix-style system. It exists in the odd space between a shell language and a general purpose language. But, shell scripting has already become somewhat of an arcane skill. I think the article nailed that Perl was just too hard to learn for the value it provided to survive. Python is not nearly as, erm, expressive as perl for wo…
Shell is a crappy scripting language because it has primitive data structures and data flow control making it hard to manage and manipulate data as you process it between applications. The fact that newlines are such a problem is a case in point. Python is a crappy shell scripting language because the syntax around pipe and subprocess is really clunky. Perl managed to have decent data structures and also have decent…
I assume you refer to https://www.pyinvoke.org/ which I just looked up. It looks quite promising, thanks for the heads-up.
Re: Perl's decline was cultural
#33For me it wasn't cultural.
Perl was my first language because I wanted to make interactive websites and that was the most common way to do it in the late 90s. Shortly after, everyone switched to PHP because mod_php was much faster than Perl CGI scripts.
Re: Perl's decline was cultural
#34Perl's "decline" saved it from a fate worst than death: popularity and splitting into dozens of incompatible versions from added/removed features (like python). Instead Perl is just available everywhere in the same stable form. Scripts always can just use the system perl interpreter. And most of the time a script written in $currentyear can run just as well on a perl system interpreter from 2 decades ago (and vice ve…
What incompatible versions of pythons do you mean? I'm entirely unaware of any forks, and the youngest version I have to supply at the moment is 3.9, which is over 5 years old and available in all supported platforms.
Re: Perl's decline was cultural
#35Perl6/Raku killed Perl. Python 3 almost killed Python. It's normal. Once a community loses faith, it's hard to stop them from leaving.
Python 3 couldn't even kill Python 2!
Re: Perl's decline was cultural
#36I think a big part is does someone starting to program even hear that Perl exists? No, and they start learning python and so have little need to learn Perl after that
That's why it has stayed dead. But that can't explain how it died. People don't just spontaneously stop hearing about the existence of a programming language in common use.
Re: Perl's decline was cultural
#37There was a lot of pressure in the Perl community to write things as succinctly as possible instead of as maintainably and understandably. That’s not realistic for use in a field with a lot of turnover and job hopping.
Yeah the joke was, Perl is write-only.
Write-only perhaps, but with perl you only have to write it once and it'll run forever, anywhere. No breaking on updates, no containers, no special version of Perl just for $application, just the system perl.
Because of this, in practice, the amount of system administration mantainence and care needed for perl programs is far, far less than other languages like python where you actually do have to go in and re-write it all the time due to dep hell and rapid changes/improvements to the language. For corporate application use cases these re-writes are happening anyway all the time so it doesn't matter. But for system administration it's a significant difference.
Re: Perl's decline was cultural
#38I spent year developing CMS in Perl in 1999 (HTA application with ActivePerl. wonder if anybody else did something like this). It traumatized me, and first thing that I did in my next job is to learn python and develop some core systems in it. Few of my friends moved from perl to python as well. I still remember spending time with my coworkers on bench outside of building trying to figure out #@$%$^&$%@something = []…
Before I eventually switched to PHP, I ended up writing multiple CMS-like solutions that would run via `cgi-bin` but write contents to the webroot (what we would now call a static site generator). As I was quite limited with the standard shared hosting at the time, I ended up inventing my own single file database format (it was a simple text file) to keep state. It worked quite beautifully and kept me afloat for the first few years of my life as a web developer around the early 2000s.
I was aware of ActivePerl and quite liked Komodo. Thankfully I could keep myself from doing things on Windows/IIS apart from a brief stint writing a single file CMS in ASP.
Re: Perl's decline was cultural
#39Nah Perl just wasn't a very good language. Not every language is equally good.
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Re: Perl's decline was cultural
#40Perl's "decline" saved it from a fate worst than death: popularity and splitting into dozens of incompatible versions from added/removed features (like python). Instead Perl is just available everywhere in the same stable form. Scripts always can just use the system perl interpreter. And most of the time a script written in $currentyear can run just as well on a perl system interpreter from 2 decades ago (and vice ve…
What incompatible versions of pythons do you mean? I'm entirely unaware of any forks, and the youngest version I have to supply at the moment is 3.9, which is over 5 years old and available in all supported platforms.
Try to run any random python program of moderate dep use on your python 3.9 system interpreter without using containers. Most likely you'll have to use a venv or the like and setup a special version of python just for that application. It's the standard now because system Python can't do it. In practice, pragmatically, there is no Python. Only pythons. And that's not even getting in to the major breakages in point version upgrades or the whole python 2 to 3 language switch.