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

#1

Post by fogus » Tue, May 11, 2010, 1:07 PM UTC

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

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

#2

Post by eli » Tue, May 11, 2010, 1:14 PM UTC

...because it's holding the entire internet together?

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

#3

Post by nailer » Tue, May 11, 2010, 1:15 PM UTC

No technology ever goes away. Nobody is saying Perl won't be developed, just that people are less likely to use other languages for new projects in favor of newer technologies.

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

#4

Post by silentium » Tue, May 11, 2010, 1:22 PM UTC

...because it is my duct tape

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

#5

Post by T_S_ » Tue, May 11, 2010, 1:29 PM UTC

Did you perhaps mean perl 5.8?

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

#6

Post by davidw » Tue, May 11, 2010, 1:31 PM UTC

Hah, what's funny is that Jeff Hobbs, the author of the article, is one of the main Tcl developers.

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

#7

Post by pstevensza » Tue, May 11, 2010, 1:34 PM UTC

silentium wrote: post #4

...because it is my duct tape

+1

...and it is my glue. So many things in my environment wouldn't happen to be able to talk to each other if it weren't for Perl.

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

#8

Post by btilly » Tue, May 11, 2010, 1:46 PM UTC

T_S_ wrote: post #5

Did you perhaps mean perl 5.8?

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.

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

#9

Post by jergosh » Tue, May 11, 2010, 1:48 PM UTC

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.

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

#10

Post by DrSprout » Tue, May 11, 2010, 1:48 PM UTC

nailer wrote: post #3

No technology ever goes away. Nobody is saying Perl won't be developed, just that people are less likely to use other languages for new projects in favor of newer technologies.

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.