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Someone is going to say -- "perl ? Does any one use it ? I had to maintain a project in perl 6 years back and I absolutely hated it ..." Disregard him. He sucks candy. EDIT: The downvotes are acting a ( ) for all the candy suckers. Checkout their useless profiles, and memorize their silly nick's. ha ha !
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Yeah, but if you get one of those responses to every post about your language/framework of choice, then maybe it's time to read the signs on the wall.
Let's be honest, Python and Ruby have eaten Perl's lunch. All it's got left to argue for it is CPAN. The first startup I worked for, in 1999, was built entirely on Perl. At the time it was a good choice. It isn't now.
Isn't a good choice for _what_?
Someone is going to say -- "perl ? Does any one use it ? I had to maintain a project in perl 6 years back and I absolutely hated it ..." Disregard him. He sucks candy. EDIT: The downvotes are acting a ( ) for all the candy suckers. Checkout their useless profiles, and memorize their silly nick's. ha ha !
Yeah, but if you get one of those responses to every post about your language/framework of choice, then maybe it's time to read the signs on the wall.
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Substitute COBOL for Perl in your post and read it again. Do you still agree?
Yes. I don't follow COBOL and can't judge it. If there is a modern COBOL, I certainly won't judge it by the COBOL that existed in the 90s. To throw the question back: Do you think Lisp is useless because it's old, or do you think the Lisp of the 80s doesn't have that much to do with the Lisp of 2011, even if the syntax didn't change that much?
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Yes. I don't follow COBOL and can't judge it. If there is a modern COBOL, I certainly won't judge it by the COBOL that existed in the 90s. To throw the question back: Do you think Lisp is useless because it's old, or do you think the Lisp of the 80s doesn't have that much to do with the Lisp of 2011, even if the syntax didn't change that much?
I think Lisp is still mostly the same as it was in the 80's and even before. But Lisp was always incredibly powerful and still has ideas that haven't reach mainstream yet. Unlike Lisp and COBOL, Lisp still has a few more things to teach us.
As I said above, it's about the value of the technology for you, your project and your team. I can't judge what's of value to you, or why something is of value to you. But you can't judge either why or what is valuable to me. We have reasons to use Perl that aren't pure stubbornness.
Edit: Forgot about the Lisp part. I actually believe that in the world of Lisp/Scheme there were many things that changed for the better, and it was driven by developments such as Arc, Clojure, Racket, Guile and so on. There are people that think every Lisp is unmaintainable, slow, outdated, has no libraries, has no community, has an unsupporting community, and so on. And my point is that the answer is always more complicated than just "they are right" or "they are wrong."
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Let's be honest, Python and Ruby have eaten Perl's lunch. All it's got left to argue for it is CPAN. The first startup I worked for, in 1999, was built entirely on Perl. At the time it was a good choice. It isn't now.
Outside of the start-up world Perl is still heavily used and Ruby is probably not quite as popular as you believe.
Python is huge though. Most people know it, many like it. Though I find far fewer people love python than perl5 or Ruby.
But perl is still there. It's still my tool of choice for most scripting, and for some fundamentally good reasons that are unlikely to change in the near future. Perl scripts fit more naturally into single files. They deal better with the enclosing unix environment (i.e. they expose things like signals instead of trying to abstract them). Operations like pack/unpack and I/O piping work in fewer tokens and more clearly than in other environments.
It's just a great language. It makes me sad that everyone wants to flame about it.
I am teaching myself C++ after this, I want to learn a scripting language. I think I will go for Perl, I want something like Perl because I feel(I don't know), that Perl will not be changing drastically in the following years, that the current userbase and available OSS code is huge and that this will not change any time soon. I also like OpenBSD and it has Perl by default. Anything I should be aware of?
Not seeing the big disaster here.
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Yeah, but if you get one of those responses to every post about your language/framework of choice, then maybe it's time to read the signs on the wall.
Signs of what exactly? That people like to argue about languages? Or are you saying that choice of language / stack should be dictated by popular trends?