I have been reading on reddit and digg people are claiming Perl is a dead language. I am a heavy Perl coder and I do not see any of this. What do you think?
Perl is not dead if you're keeping track of the language. While the development of the core language seems to have shuffled off the mortal coil, CPAN is more active today than ever before.
However, if this belief keeps up outside the community, it will ensure the decline of Perl. There are few new high-profile projects in Perl as it is.
I'm happy there's a recent brouhaha in the Perl community in an effort to market better. Unfortunately, the language is still what it is, which is a pity, because people then ignore the rest of the package. CPAN alone is reason enough to select Perl over all the other popular dynamically-typed languages, but most outsiders never get far enough to realize that.
It has been losing a significant amount of market and mindshare to new competitors. What was once the "workhorse of the internet" is now barely seen anywhere user-facing. Heavier lifting than shell scripting is increasingly being preformed by python.
I can see it holding on to a few niches, like text processing, but it's never going to be the perl that was. Which is a shame, because there's a wonderfully huge general purpose codebase which is just going to go to waste now.
What I think is that you should spend less time browsing Reddit or Digg. Really, there's so much shit in that website, and most users don't even realize what is going on. Basically, the content of these websites is taken over by people with an agenda.
It's pretty much what >>2 said.
Plus xkcd/reddit/digg trolls saying "OMG SUX, LINE NOISE, WRITE ONLY, ETC..." are kinda runing it for everyone in the hobbyist community who likes perl or tries to reccomend it to others with their constant noise.
Me being just a comp sci student, still doing the course. I really like perl because coding in it feels pretty natural and there are plenty of fun ways to do stuff. Plus CPAN is so useful.
Oh God, where would I be without CPAN? Perl is a beautiful language. I'm not a programmer by profession and I only code websites in Perl for fun. I have tried to do the programming thing before, but none of them ever made sense to me and it felt so forced. But for some reason Perl was very intuitive for me.
I think people believe Perl is dead because it is very old. People think that all languages must eventually die simply because of age. I think these people are the young programmers who want to be edgy and cool with their Python and Ruby. I also believe that this is the fault of the Perl community, and I'm not saying that necessarily as a bad thing! The Perl community doesn't like to make a big fuzz and stroke their own ego (as far as programming languages go). To add to that, Perl doesn't hold a large share of programming newbies. Wherever programming newbies go, all the fuzz goes. Like PHP. It's all the rage with beginner web programmers, so obviously it's a pretty big deal beyond the sphere of professional programmers.
I think people will look at Ruby and read its description and say, oh hey, this like a modern improved version of Perl! Who'd bother with Perl if they read something like that? (I meant by the way Ruby markets itself as having implemented that best features of Perl and other languages)
>>6
I'd also like to add that I don't think there's nothing wrong with using languages like PHP, Python, or Ruby. I'm just saying I wish people would give Perl a fair shake instead of dismissing it simply because they feel it's old and dead.
Python needs some speed enhancements. The Google-sponsored project Unladen Swallow has a goal to improve performance, and hence to facilitate the movement of performance-sensitive code from C back to Python.
That said, Python code is read-many. Perl code is write-once. A gross oversimplification? Perhaps. But the truth shouldn't be ignored.
Perl was an awesome language for Unix scripts and text processing, but it already had a difficult grammar, for example the different arguments in functions that had to be manually shifted with @_.
There are 2 bad things happening to Perl right now:
>>9
Perl has a third problem:
http://www.nongnu.org/txr/
A whole mass of problems that most users would solve with some awk/sed/perl/etc combination is solved conveniently with this utility.
>>11
just what everyone wants... more buggy non-free gnu bloat to replace stable, easier to use free software.
>>12
Except that it's stable, not buggy, free, not gnu. "Easier to use" is relative.
go pearl go!
> free, not gnu
it's on a gnu site. it's licensed under gnu's proprietary anti-free license.
> stable, not buggy
if that's true then it's the first such software those gnu fascists have ever produced.
> it's on a gnu site. it's licensed under gnu's proprietary anti-free license.
The website is called 'nongnu.org'. What does that tell you? The licence used is BSD.
> if that's true then it's the first such software those gnu fascists have ever produced.
1) It's not written by someone associated with GNU
2) GNU has stable software
What exactly is your problem?
>>16
Should be plain enough to tell what his problem is -- he's an assclown.
And also, GPL is entirely free for all that will ever matter to you, unless you happen to be either a large corporation or a script kiddie, in either case looking to steal other people's code without any requirement on your part. Quit trolling and go back to 4chan.
>>1
Core language development sent many people into hiatus... or into PHP.
Perl6 is now lagging two years after an acceptable release date.
Core syntax updates like named sub patterns and recursive patterns haven't been addressed. (PCRE library addressed those and PHP got the benefits)
And the need for a performant not-typed object oriented language that is also performant (Python WANTS to be slow and PHP WANTS MOAR FEATURES NOMATTERWHAT! gargle) is now so desperate even something weird as go got an incredible amount of publicity.
Perl6 core promises to throw away regexes in favor of an extended concept, a super regex called rule. I'm all in favour of this, but gimme a working executable I don't have to compile in Haskell dammit.
Is this going to end the duke-nukem way?
And what's good, and more, in Perl6, to come?
my $x=1..Inf is acceptable, runs and sets x to every number from 1 to Infinite)> named sub patterns and recursive patterns
Perl has those: http://perldoc.perl.org/perlreref.html
> not-typed object oriented language that is also performant
Self and (depending on the form of OO) SBCL, Factor and LuaJIT2. V8 is slowly creeping up.
> I'm all in favour of this, but gimme a working executable I don't have to compile in Haskell dammit.
Pugs has been dead for a few years.
Perl is a great scripting language for quick little jobs. All the knobs out there that got such a chubby over this and decided to try and write actual applications in the language and take it on as a way of life R stupid.
Perl is like a tool box. Every family should have one in their home. Owning a tool box doesn't automatically make you a mechanic, but it is liberating to know you can fix things that are quick and easy around the house. And the more you learn to use them, the more you are able to fix.
Perl was sick, but not dead, in 2009.
However - around mid 2011 - yes - it finally died. Nobody is updating or maintainng any of the major (and already-antique) perl resources anymore.
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┖┸─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘>>22
you should try perl6/rakudo, seriously
Perl is dead.
Perl6 will not revive Perl.
Perl6 is not a Perl update.
Perl6 is an entirely new language that just happens to be an updated Perl.
New languages are never late, just not yet released.
What I'm trying to say is, Perl is not dead.
Do you understand what I'm saying.
Perl is the only "big" scripting language in OpenBSD base system. A lot of people still use it for things from quick scripts to full applications. Just a few years ago I was working for a company that managed all DB inventory through Perl and DBI (PostgreSQL and Oracle). I maintained that codebase (something like 20,000 lines of Perl, not counting CPAN modules) and added features as needed, and never ran into the "write once" problem that people often allude to, despite only having met with the original author of that code once. If you simply adopt good practices and write solid code, Perl is a fine choice for many projects. The problem is people who don't know any better run their mouths and others start to believe those lies. But this will come to bite them in the ass, because their favorite language (Python or whatever) will also be subjected to that in time. Anyway, Perl isn't dead any more dead than C. That one also gets a bad rap because of its string handling and buffer overflows, but it's still widely used. Tools that work and are useful will remain...
Like >>26 said, OpenBSD uses a lot Perl for everything.
And Perl, is not a dead language, just look the cpan, every day there is a new module.
this thread is almost five years old
>>28
and people still insist that perl was dead five years ago, despite the fact that the latest stable release was only 4 months ago and the latest preview release was last month.