131–135 of 135 posts
I wonder how much of Perl's decline can be attributed to the Duke-Nukem-Forever-tier delay in releasing perl6. It seemed like so much of the web ran on it in the late 90s and early 2000s that it would have at least as much traction as PHP does today.
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Perl was being used in bioinformatics in the early 1990s - definitely before the "late 90s". Perl was becoming the go-to language in Unix fields in early 1990s, and bioinformatics comes out of that Unix tradition. (See also my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11381917 .) There's no reason to guess which factors contributed to Perl's uptake in the young bioinformatics community. Text processing is only…
I switched to Python in 2011 (basically because Django was a lot easier to get into as web framework, better docs and because too many ways to do things made Catalyst confusing for a beginner). Perl was starting to loose ground by then, but was still pretty popular. My guess is around a third of bioinformaticans were using it as the goto language at that point. Its a pity, I miss Perl and still pull it out for quick…
# get_function_names.py
for line in open("python_yacc.py"):
if line =~ m/def (?P\w+) *(?P\(.*\)) *:/:
print repr($1), repr($args)
It got appreciative hisses when I did a lightning talk about it at a PyCon.
FWIW, I co-founded Biopython back in 1999.
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Perl6 was a reaction to Perl's loss of mindshare, not its cause. One can speculate what might have happened if focus had been put on evolving Perl5, or getting Rakudo production-ready as-is instead of going through yet another round of 'tinkering' (eg making the compiler backend-independent, the New Object Model refactor, creation of MoarVM, the Great List Refactor, ...) - however my crystal ball seems to be broken a…
> Perl6 was a reaction to Perl's loss of mindshare, not its cause. True, but when your reaction takes 10 years, you lost a lot of ground. When perl6 was started perl was declining but still in serious use.
It's percentage has dropped by a significant amount, but I would bet the amount of new code has not dropped nearly as much.
Also I'm fairly certain that Go is close to a 10 year reaction to Python. (If not it's implementation.) The only difference is that it wasn't done in public. It's so much easier to ignore the years of development when you can hide it.
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Aren't 100% perl code -> paint splatters. For each code there exists a paint splatter i.e. image of the code itself.
I'm just saying the logic doesn't follow. Given the claim does not necessarily require the opposite to be true. I don't actually know much about this perl being paint splatter and why that even makes sense. Your statement might make sense, but what I'm saying is that the claim in the title doesn't equate to the claim you made. That's all I'm saying.