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Its not dead, but how much new code is being written in Perl? I generally measure th health of a language by how much contemporary use it gets. I used to write

Its not dead, but how much new code is being written in Perl? I generally measure th health of a language by how much contemporary use it gets. I used to write Perl but I do not take it out of the tool chest anymore and I see very few Perl codebases in the OSS world.

nerdponx 7y ago
I just don't see a reason to use it nowadays. Python is more verbose, but it's also easier to read and debug, and its tooling and package ecosystem is less chaotic. And for small stuff, I just have Zsh, which is a perfectly suitable Perl replacement.
forinti 7y ago
It's always there in every Linux distribution. And Oracle seems to like it as they include lots of perl scripts with their products.
shakna 7y ago
> I used to write Perl but I do not take it out of the tool chest anymore and I see very few Perl codebases in the OSS world. It's still haunting under the covers of many a proprietary app. It handles all the database processing for a fairly modern program I reverse engineered last year (so we could transfer from it to a new program without having to manually re-enter the 2.3million record database). Heck it was only a couple years ago that macOS used Perl for string processing in libc. [0] (I believe it now forks to sh instead.) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18920122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18920122
z3phyr 7y ago
The OSS world, all the glitter, is just an iceberg to the ice continent of the software industry as a whole. There is still a lot of new mainframe code written today. And a lot of glue scripts are still written in perl at various software houses
- msla 7y ago
  The OSS world is all glitter? Huh, I guess all of those ancient Apache installations running mod_perl are more glamorous than we thought. Ditto the busybox shells on a million embedded systems, but I guess that's a bit beyond most here.
Diederich 7y ago
> how much new code is being written in Perl? Nothing like a full answer to your question: https://metacpan.org/recent https://metacpan.org/recent Alas, not nearly so active as it used to be, but still a fair amount of activity.

nerdponx 7y ago

I just don't see a reason to use it nowadays. Python is more verbose, but it's also easier to read and debug, and its tooling and package ecosystem is less chaotic. And for small stuff, I just have Zsh, which is a perfectly suitable Perl replacement.

forinti 7y ago

It's always there in every Linux distribution. And Oracle seems to like it as they include lots of perl scripts with their products.

shakna 7y ago

> I used to write Perl but I do not take it out of the tool chest anymore and I see very few Perl codebases in the OSS world. It's still haunting under the covers of many a proprietary app. It handles all the database processing for a fairly modern program I reverse engineered last year (so we could transfer from it to a new program without having to manually re-enter the 2.3million record database). Heck it was only a couple years ago that macOS used Perl for string processing in libc. [0] (I believe it now forks to sh instead.) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18920122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18920122

z3phyr 7y ago

The OSS world, all the glitter, is just an iceberg to the ice continent of the software industry as a whole. There is still a lot of new mainframe code written today. And a lot of glue scripts are still written in perl at various software houses

msla 7y ago
The OSS world is all glitter? Huh, I guess all of those ancient Apache installations running mod_perl are more glamorous than we thought. Ditto the busybox shells on a million embedded systems, but I guess that's a bit beyond most here.

Diederich 7y ago

> how much new code is being written in Perl? Nothing like a full answer to your question: https://metacpan.org/recent https://metacpan.org/recent Alas, not nearly so active as it used to be, but still a fair amount of activity.