Perl's decline was cultural • Hacker News Board

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#111

Post by Scarblac » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 7:17 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #29

mmastrac wrote: post #4

In fairness, Perl died because it was just not a good language compared to others that popped up after its peak. Sometimes people just move to the better option.

Perl is a great language, the way Scala and Haskell are great: as openly experimental languages, they tried interesting, unorthodox approaches, with varied success. "More than one way to do it" is Perl's motto, because of its audacious experimentation ethos, I'd say. Perl is not that good a language though for practical purposes. The same way, a breadboard contraption is not what you want to ship as your hardware pro…

It could have used a good "Perl: the Good Parts" book.

With a team where everybody wrote it in a similar style, Perl did perfectly well. Mod_perl was fast. I liked Perl.

Then Django came out, and then Numpy, and Perl lost. But Python is still so incredibly slow....

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#112

Post by agumonkey » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 7:17 PM UTC

atherton94027 wrote: post #17

mmastrac wrote: post #4

In fairness, Perl died because it was just not a good language compared to others that popped up after its peak. Sometimes people just move to the better option.

There was so much complexity hidden behind "do what I mean". For example, scalar vs array context which was super subtle: my @var = @array # copy the array my $var = @array # return the count of elements in array

I always found contextual eval interesting. It's a generalized version of toString in a way

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#113

Post by rightbyte » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 7:19 PM UTC

tmp10423288442 wrote: post #70

simonw wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This made me smile given Python's love of Monty Python references - the cheese shop etc.

I appreciated them at the time I encountered them (mid-2000s), but they were definitely a bit cringe in their frequency and shamelessness. I wonder if younger people even know Monty Python anymore - by my time, I think people had mostly forgotten about Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, even if 42 survived.

Dude it is not cringe. It is silly.

Pretending to be a all serius grown ups language is cringe.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#114

Post by wvenable » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 7:22 PM UTC

sammy2255 wrote: post #53

I don't understand how Perl fell off and PHP didn't

Perl is a very difficult language. PHP was a comparatively simple language. PHP was just a scripting language for C and incorporated as many open source C libraries as possible back when open source libraries were a bit of disjointed mess.

PHP's success and Perl's decline was obvious at the time.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#115

Post by creer » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 7:22 PM UTC

Scarblac wrote: post #111

nine_k wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl is a great language, the way Scala and Haskell are great: as openly experimental languages, they tried interesting, unorthodox approaches, with varied success. "More than one way to do it" is Perl's motto, because of its audacious experimentation ethos, I'd say. Perl is not that good a language though for practical purposes. The same way, a breadboard contraption is not what you want to ship as your hardware pro…

It could have used a good "Perl: the Good Parts" book. With a team where everybody wrote it in a similar style, Perl did perfectly well. Mod_perl was fast. I liked Perl. Then Django came out, and then Numpy, and Perl lost. But Python is still so incredibly slow....

Mostly - from here - python is so incredibly slow to write. Who has this kind of time?

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#116

Post by weare138 » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 7:22 PM UTC

js2 wrote: post #28

atherton94027 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was so much complexity hidden behind "do what I mean". For example, scalar vs array context which was super subtle: my @var = @array # copy the array my $var = @array # return the count of elements in array

Or even worse: my($f) = `fortune`; # assigns first line of output to $f. my $f = `fortune`; # assign all output to $f. Which allegedly got a HS kid in hot water[^1]. [^1]: "It's all about context" (2001): https://archive.ph/IB2kR ( http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/UnixReview/col38.html )

Then don't use the low level interfaces. In Perl, language features are plug and play. Everything's in a module. Use the core module List::Util instead.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#117

Post by oncallthrow » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 7:22 PM UTC

webdevver wrote: post #30

i disagree, python is Just Better. ive never used perl but ive had to install it due to some antique tools requiring it, and every time its been an incomprehensible mess. i still have no idea how packages work in perl. also, it seems like everything in perl is a string? and the syntax looks like a mess. maybe its painful for guys to admit that languages could be a lot better designed, and when such langauges appeared…

> also, it seems like everything in perl is a string?

It's actually somehow even worse than this. The Perl type system is honestly ridiculous. Most veteran Perl developers don't fully understand it.

https://blogs.perl.org/users/leon_timmermans/2025/02/a-deep-... is a good introduction.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#118

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 7:23 PM UTC

Perl is still required for compiling autotools, openssl, nasm, etc.

As such, is likely to be around for a long, long time

Python is sometimes required for compiling software, too, but projects like the ones mentioned above requiring Perl have not switched to Python

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#119

Post by oncallthrow » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 7:25 PM UTC

MrDarcy wrote: post #50

lysace wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl is a sysadmin language. There's "always" been this tension between sysadmins and developers. In my mind (developer back then) I'd amateur-psychoanalyze all of that nonsense as some kind of inferiority complex meant to preserve the self image. Needless complexity can be a feature! And now we are all developers!

In the 2000’s Python was also a sysadmin language. Edit: But I see your point, Google SRE’s around the late 2000’s reached for Python more than Perl.

I think Perl is still more popular even today than Python as a sysadmin language. Late 2000s it certainly was. Maybe Google was different, but across the industry more widely Python was barely used, Perl was used everywhere.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#120

Post by autoexec » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 7:25 PM UTC

neuroelectron wrote: post #79

Perl being so old means it's extremely fast for what it's designed to do, process streams or pipes. In a few tasks, it's faster than C, but being much faster to create a script or program that is useful, and with the implicit syntactic sugar, and since it's so flexible, you can just do things in the one way you know how and that's usually good enough. Python is pretty good too for this and because modern computers ar…

Perl is amazing when it comes to regular expressions too. It's one of the reasons why perl is way more fun to write than Python. I still use perl for regex heavy tasks. I wish that python had integrated regex into the language the same way.