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Perl5 -> Perl6 has been highly contentious. Perl6 is basically a different language much to the chagrin of many Perl users. A lot of Perl users are entrenched

Perl5 -> Perl6 has been highly contentious. Perl6 is basically a different language much to the chagrin of many Perl users. A lot of Perl users are entrenched in Perl5. FWIW: I'm unclear why people continue to use Perl at all, I moved on in 2011.

folkhack 7y ago
In the same boat on the "why haven't people moved on"... Perl use to be ubiquitous but over time it's really gone to the wayside vs. Python tooling for more complex stuff, and back to basic BASH for the simple scripting needs. Every time Perl comes up in a professional environment for me I'm reluctant to say I'm capable, because it's always a hacked-together mess from an engineer who's likely no longer with the company. (obviously this is VERY anecdotal to my career) I dropped Perl from my resume about a decade ago because I just frankly don't want to work with it. The language is terse, and I don't think anyone who's starting off these days would be spending their time well by learning it. Make your own opinions, but mine is/has always been "ewww."
- overcast 7y ago
  Definitely not anecdotal, that's the story from EVERY company.
  - lilSebastian 7y ago
    > EVERY company Not sure you know what the word every means.
- lilSebastian 7y ago
  > The language is terse Only if you chose to write perl code in this way. The same could be said for many languages
- Touche 7y ago
  > it's always a hacked-together mess from an engineer who's likely no longer with the company. (obviously this is VERY anecdotal to my career) That's what programming is.
  - folkhack 7y ago
    > That's what programming is. In my realm I need things to be supportable by lots of people. I use languages that are modern + people want to use, I document like crazy, I use opinionated frameworks that have good track records, I need to hire engineers that can support the code I/others write, etc etc. I don't find your comment to be true, and will even go as far to say I've worked with very clean legacy code. Tangential: If you look at any "popularity of language" studies Perl has been on a downward spiral for over a decade. Ex: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/perl/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/perl/ I see "well that's just x" as a poor argument for, well... anything.
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    False equivalence. I'd choose a hacked-together mess from an engineer who's likely no longer with the company written in Python over Perl any day.
- bifrost 7y ago
  Heh yeah, totally. The only Perl I use these days is oooooooold software (MRTG) I guess with the exception of Spam Assassin and RT...
  - folkhack 7y ago
    Man - MRTG... I just had flashbacks to my youth. Loved that piece of software and used it for close to a decade! Anymore Grafana backed by InfluxDB w/Telegraf is my jam for the same general problem set (TIG stack).
    - bifrost 7y ago
      Yeah, I probably should update things but honestly if I'm going to do that I'm just going to write my own poller/scheduler and be done with it. RRD is pretty efficient so I don't have much need to change.
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    Ugh. Spam Assassin is so astronomically inefficient and power hungry, that there should be a cryptocurrency based on Proof of Spam Assassination.
    - bifrost 7y ago
      Be careful, "Spam on the Blockchain" will become a thing.
    - jlokier 7y ago
      Hah! You don't know how right you are... > there should be a cryptocurrency based on Proof of Spam Assassination Did you know that the blocking proof-of-work algorithm in Bitcoin today, derives from the Hashcash proof-of-work algorithm, which was originally designed to prove you are not a spammer!!
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  It’s the Perl culture, to do even simple things in the weirdest way possible and everyone will call you a wizard. Whereas the Python community praises complex ideas expressed as simple code and frowns on tricks. That’s why all but the the most obsessive have moved on. And from what I’ve seen Perl 6 takes it to the next level.
  - __jal 7y ago
    You pretty clearly have very little familiarity with "Perl culture" and even less with Perl6/Raku. Perl 5 is in decline, no doubt. But it isn't because whomever you're visualizing when you wrote the above is an annoying nerd. People can and do disagree on the 'why'; I personally think it is the general decline of Unix-style syntax combined with the natural ebb and flow of language evolution. If "what you've seen" is watching the compiler developers work through language design, the origin of your misconception at least makes a little sense, even if that's obviously a weird, unfair basis. By all means, hate on perlmonks.org if you like. Just don't spread insulting nonsense.
    - xisukar 7y ago
      It's unfortunate but that's the bread-and-butter of comment sections mentioning Perl (Perl 5 and Perl 6). And what's with "the most obsessive"? What's this supposed to imply?
- kazinator 7y ago
  > it's always a hacked-together mess from an engineer who's likely no longer with the company. Oh man, in 1996 I was at Nortel. Some Ms. C. in Computer Science (no longer with the company) left behind Perl cruft whose indentation levels didn't even match up: whatever { } type of thing. He didn't know how to operate a programmer's text editor.
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    The Broken Windows Theory may be bullshit when it comes to criminology, but I truly believe it applies to code. I've seen a lot of negligently written code with broken windows on the surface, that deep down turns out to be criminally insane. If somebody's doesn't give a shit enough to indent their code, they usually don't give a shit enough to design it either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
- dana321 7y ago
  I would rather deal with that than a project with millions of classes which are mostly empty full of useless comments that tell you nothing about how the project is put together.
- ether_at_cpan 7y ago
  > I dropped Perl from my resume about a decade ago because I just frankly don't want to work with it. That's exactly why I've never mentioned Java on my resume (or in earlier times, Visual Basic) =D
lilSebastian 7y ago
> FWIW: I'm unclear why people continue to use Perl at all Great language, large library on cpan, great eco system, people enjoy using it, they have a large code base that's run fine for decades. Choose 1 or more. > I moved on in 2011 You're right, it's all about you and what you do...
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  No, it's all about evangelizing and recruiting as many other people as possible to go down with the sinking ship you've committed yourself to. The Evangelism Hole: Getting People Back to Perl http://act.yapc.eu/lpw2014/talk/5758 http://act.yapc.eu/lpw2014/talk/5758
  - Grinnz 7y ago
    It only sinks when people stop contributing to it. Which is a trend, but so far not a fatal one.
  - lilSebastian 7y ago
    > No, it's all about evangelizing and recruiting as many other people as possible to go down with the sinking ship you've committed yourself to. You have no idea who I am, what I do, or what my commitments are.
- dang 7y ago
  Hi, would you mind reviewing the site guidelines? I'm afraid your comments have already been breaking them quite a bit, and we ban accounts that do that. The idea here is to post thoughtful and substantive comments, not aggressive ones, and to avoid the flamewar style, which degrades discussion quality and provokes worse from others. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - lilSebastian 7y ago
    Looking at the guidelines, many of the posts I replied to are breaking these rules, yet haven't been flagged.
notyourday 7y ago
> FWIW: I'm unclear why people continue to use Perl at all, I moved on in 2011. Because it works. Scripts/software that works does not experience bit rot. As long as it works, people will continue to use it. Edit: OK, fine. It seems the downvoters are convinced that the code does in fact experience bit rot, and spoils with time. Probably like fish.
- bifrost 7y ago
  Sure but there's a reason that development has moved off of Perl.
  - lilSebastian 7y ago
    > Sure but there's a reason that development has moved off of Perl. Why don't you specify this single reason you allude to?
    - luckylion 7y ago
      That's just a saying, it doesn't mean that there's one specific reason, it means "that didn't happen by accident". I think there are plenty of reasons, and they work to reinforce each other.
      - lilSebastian 7y ago
        > That's just a saying, it doesn't mean that there's one specific reason > a reason Singular, in English that means there's a single reason. > I think there are plenty of reasons, and they work to reinforce each other Care to expand on this? Genuinely interesting, a thread where people complain about a language and they are so careless with the language they use to try and get their point across...
        luckylion 7y ago
        > Care to expand on this? Not particularly since you seem very combative... but here it goes, from the top of my head: without Moose/Moo etc OOP is (was? no clue, I don't follow development any more) just cumbersome and archaic (and with it you'll run into strange things when you hit errors), support in modern IDEs is lacking, there are few developers and therefore a smaller community, it's often not among the officially provided SDKs etc. Those are all interconnected. You can't easily hire Perl developers. Nobody wants to pay large sums to compete about the few there are to provide an SDK for a language that is on its way out. Nobody wants to work with a language that's not really supported by businesses. There's no large community to improve tools. Of course, I don't mean literally nobody, just very little. It's a vicious circle. I liked Perl (it has a special place in my heart), I've written a ton of stuff in Perl, some of it I still support, but I can't say that I've missed it in the last five or so years since I've stopped actively writing it. I still occasionally log into the perl-focused community I used to frequent and they are still getting about a post a week. I never gave Perl6 a chance, simply because it would be a switch to another language where knowing Perl didn't really transfer, so I might as well go where the music plays. And yeah, CPAN-modules are nice and all, but a lot of it always looked to me as if written for a contest of clever code, not to be read & understood easily.
rafaelvasco 7y ago
In several instances it's a matter of comfort zone, one of the biggest enemies of positive progress;
yellowapple 7y ago
I'm all about using the right tool for the job. Sometimes Perl is that tool, and thus sometimes I'll still use Perl.
- folkhack 7y ago
  Genuinely curious - and not trying to be a jerk... but where do you find Perl fits well? I can only imagine needing it if I'm stuck on a legacy OS/strictly governed environment where it's the only option I have. (ie: governmental work etc.)
  - notyourday 7y ago
    Brain dead workers. Ask what to do. Fetch the needed data. Do the thing with that job. Signal job completion or failure. Die. Wait for a supervisor to restart you for the next job.
    - yellowapple 7y ago
      Yep. Nowadays Erlang (or Elixir) would be my tool of choice for that, but before discovering those (or when that felt like overkill) a quick Perl script would be my way to go. Incidentally, apply this to web requests/responses and you've invented CGI (where Perl was incredibly useful, even if PHP happened to be a bit more popular).
  - Grinnz 7y ago
    Oneliners that range from simple text processing to complex magic. Wonderful web applications in Mojolicious. Lexical scoping and strict variable checking. Four strong event loop ecosystems, futures and promises, and an in development async/await syntax all for collaborating asynchronous tasks. Great integration with shared libraries through XS and FFI. A consistent culture of documentation and testing for everything on CPAN. And mainly, familiarity with the language.
  - amalcon 7y ago
    Not grandparent, but to me, Perl's niche is short log-processing scripts (like, 200 lines or fewer). Once it looks like it will either need an input other than a text file or grow to a significant length, I tend to rewrite in something else. However, for short log processing scripts, I've not found anything with even close to the same productivity.
pvaldes 7y ago
> I'm unclear why people continue to use Perl at all It does the job
ether_at_cpan 7y ago
> I'm unclear why people continue to use Perl at all Because there's a huge amount of applications and websites still built in it, and it's still a great language so new projects are written in it all the time. source: my very prosperous career, which has been almost entirely in Perl for the last 15 years

folkhack 7y ago

In the same boat on the "why haven't people moved on"... Perl use to be ubiquitous but over time it's really gone to the wayside vs. Python tooling for more complex stuff, and back to basic BASH for the simple scripting needs. Every time Perl comes up in a professional environment for me I'm reluctant to say I'm capable, because it's always a hacked-together mess from an engineer who's likely no longer with the company. (obviously this is VERY anecdotal to my career) I dropped Perl from my resume about a decade ago because I just frankly don't want to work with it. The language is terse, and I don't think anyone who's starting off these days would be spending their time well by learning it. Make your own opinions, but mine is/has always been "ewww."

overcast 7y ago
Definitely not anecdotal, that's the story from EVERY company.
- lilSebastian 7y ago
  > EVERY company Not sure you know what the word every means.
lilSebastian 7y ago
> The language is terse Only if you chose to write perl code in this way. The same could be said for many languages
Touche 7y ago
> it's always a hacked-together mess from an engineer who's likely no longer with the company. (obviously this is VERY anecdotal to my career) That's what programming is.
- folkhack 7y ago
  > That's what programming is. In my realm I need things to be supportable by lots of people. I use languages that are modern + people want to use, I document like crazy, I use opinionated frameworks that have good track records, I need to hire engineers that can support the code I/others write, etc etc. I don't find your comment to be true, and will even go as far to say I've worked with very clean legacy code. Tangential: If you look at any "popularity of language" studies Perl has been on a downward spiral for over a decade. Ex: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/perl/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/perl/ I see "well that's just x" as a poor argument for, well... anything.
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  False equivalence. I'd choose a hacked-together mess from an engineer who's likely no longer with the company written in Python over Perl any day.
bifrost 7y ago
Heh yeah, totally. The only Perl I use these days is oooooooold software (MRTG) I guess with the exception of Spam Assassin and RT...
- folkhack 7y ago
  Man - MRTG... I just had flashbacks to my youth. Loved that piece of software and used it for close to a decade! Anymore Grafana backed by InfluxDB w/Telegraf is my jam for the same general problem set (TIG stack).
  - bifrost 7y ago
    Yeah, I probably should update things but honestly if I'm going to do that I'm just going to write my own poller/scheduler and be done with it. RRD is pretty efficient so I don't have much need to change.
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  Ugh. Spam Assassin is so astronomically inefficient and power hungry, that there should be a cryptocurrency based on Proof of Spam Assassination.
  - bifrost 7y ago
    Be careful, "Spam on the Blockchain" will become a thing.
  - jlokier 7y ago
    Hah! You don't know how right you are... > there should be a cryptocurrency based on Proof of Spam Assassination Did you know that the blocking proof-of-work algorithm in Bitcoin today, derives from the Hashcash proof-of-work algorithm, which was originally designed to prove you are not a spammer!!
goatinaboat 7y ago
It’s the Perl culture, to do even simple things in the weirdest way possible and everyone will call you a wizard. Whereas the Python community praises complex ideas expressed as simple code and frowns on tricks. That’s why all but the the most obsessive have moved on. And from what I’ve seen Perl 6 takes it to the next level.
- __jal 7y ago
  You pretty clearly have very little familiarity with "Perl culture" and even less with Perl6/Raku. Perl 5 is in decline, no doubt. But it isn't because whomever you're visualizing when you wrote the above is an annoying nerd. People can and do disagree on the 'why'; I personally think it is the general decline of Unix-style syntax combined with the natural ebb and flow of language evolution. If "what you've seen" is watching the compiler developers work through language design, the origin of your misconception at least makes a little sense, even if that's obviously a weird, unfair basis. By all means, hate on perlmonks.org if you like. Just don't spread insulting nonsense.
  - xisukar 7y ago
    It's unfortunate but that's the bread-and-butter of comment sections mentioning Perl (Perl 5 and Perl 6). And what's with "the most obsessive"? What's this supposed to imply?
kazinator 7y ago
> it's always a hacked-together mess from an engineer who's likely no longer with the company. Oh man, in 1996 I was at Nortel. Some Ms. C. in Computer Science (no longer with the company) left behind Perl cruft whose indentation levels didn't even match up: whatever { } type of thing. He didn't know how to operate a programmer's text editor.
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  The Broken Windows Theory may be bullshit when it comes to criminology, but I truly believe it applies to code. I've seen a lot of negligently written code with broken windows on the surface, that deep down turns out to be criminally insane. If somebody's doesn't give a shit enough to indent their code, they usually don't give a shit enough to design it either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
dana321 7y ago
I would rather deal with that than a project with millions of classes which are mostly empty full of useless comments that tell you nothing about how the project is put together.
ether_at_cpan 7y ago
> I dropped Perl from my resume about a decade ago because I just frankly don't want to work with it. That's exactly why I've never mentioned Java on my resume (or in earlier times, Visual Basic) =D

lilSebastian 7y ago

> FWIW: I'm unclear why people continue to use Perl at all Great language, large library on cpan, great eco system, people enjoy using it, they have a large code base that's run fine for decades. Choose 1 or more. > I moved on in 2011 You're right, it's all about you and what you do...

DonHopkins 7y ago
No, it's all about evangelizing and recruiting as many other people as possible to go down with the sinking ship you've committed yourself to. The Evangelism Hole: Getting People Back to Perl http://act.yapc.eu/lpw2014/talk/5758 http://act.yapc.eu/lpw2014/talk/5758
- Grinnz 7y ago
  It only sinks when people stop contributing to it. Which is a trend, but so far not a fatal one.
- lilSebastian 7y ago
  > No, it's all about evangelizing and recruiting as many other people as possible to go down with the sinking ship you've committed yourself to. You have no idea who I am, what I do, or what my commitments are.
dang 7y ago
Hi, would you mind reviewing the site guidelines? I'm afraid your comments have already been breaking them quite a bit, and we ban accounts that do that. The idea here is to post thoughtful and substantive comments, not aggressive ones, and to avoid the flamewar style, which degrades discussion quality and provokes worse from others. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- lilSebastian 7y ago
  Looking at the guidelines, many of the posts I replied to are breaking these rules, yet haven't been flagged.

notyourday 7y ago

> FWIW: I'm unclear why people continue to use Perl at all, I moved on in 2011. Because it works. Scripts/software that works does not experience bit rot. As long as it works, people will continue to use it. Edit: OK, fine. It seems the downvoters are convinced that the code does in fact experience bit rot, and spoils with time. Probably like fish.

bifrost 7y ago
Sure but there's a reason that development has moved off of Perl.
- lilSebastian 7y ago
  > Sure but there's a reason that development has moved off of Perl. Why don't you specify this single reason you allude to?
  - luckylion 7y ago
    That's just a saying, it doesn't mean that there's one specific reason, it means "that didn't happen by accident". I think there are plenty of reasons, and they work to reinforce each other.
    - lilSebastian 7y ago
      > That's just a saying, it doesn't mean that there's one specific reason > a reason Singular, in English that means there's a single reason. > I think there are plenty of reasons, and they work to reinforce each other Care to expand on this? Genuinely interesting, a thread where people complain about a language and they are so careless with the language they use to try and get their point across...
      - luckylion 7y ago
        > Care to expand on this? Not particularly since you seem very combative... but here it goes, from the top of my head: without Moose/Moo etc OOP is (was? no clue, I don't follow development any more) just cumbersome and archaic (and with it you'll run into strange things when you hit errors), support in modern IDEs is lacking, there are few developers and therefore a smaller community, it's often not among the officially provided SDKs etc. Those are all interconnected. You can't easily hire Perl developers. Nobody wants to pay large sums to compete about the few there are to provide an SDK for a language that is on its way out. Nobody wants to work with a language that's not really supported by businesses. There's no large community to improve tools. Of course, I don't mean literally nobody, just very little. It's a vicious circle. I liked Perl (it has a special place in my heart), I've written a ton of stuff in Perl, some of it I still support, but I can't say that I've missed it in the last five or so years since I've stopped actively writing it. I still occasionally log into the perl-focused community I used to frequent and they are still getting about a post a week. I never gave Perl6 a chance, simply because it would be a switch to another language where knowing Perl didn't really transfer, so I might as well go where the music plays. And yeah, CPAN-modules are nice and all, but a lot of it always looked to me as if written for a contest of clever code, not to be read & understood easily.

rafaelvasco 7y ago

In several instances it's a matter of comfort zone, one of the biggest enemies of positive progress;

yellowapple 7y ago

I'm all about using the right tool for the job. Sometimes Perl is that tool, and thus sometimes I'll still use Perl.

folkhack 7y ago
Genuinely curious - and not trying to be a jerk... but where do you find Perl fits well? I can only imagine needing it if I'm stuck on a legacy OS/strictly governed environment where it's the only option I have. (ie: governmental work etc.)
- notyourday 7y ago
  Brain dead workers. Ask what to do. Fetch the needed data. Do the thing with that job. Signal job completion or failure. Die. Wait for a supervisor to restart you for the next job.
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    Yep. Nowadays Erlang (or Elixir) would be my tool of choice for that, but before discovering those (or when that felt like overkill) a quick Perl script would be my way to go. Incidentally, apply this to web requests/responses and you've invented CGI (where Perl was incredibly useful, even if PHP happened to be a bit more popular).
- Grinnz 7y ago
  Oneliners that range from simple text processing to complex magic. Wonderful web applications in Mojolicious. Lexical scoping and strict variable checking. Four strong event loop ecosystems, futures and promises, and an in development async/await syntax all for collaborating asynchronous tasks. Great integration with shared libraries through XS and FFI. A consistent culture of documentation and testing for everything on CPAN. And mainly, familiarity with the language.
- amalcon 7y ago
  Not grandparent, but to me, Perl's niche is short log-processing scripts (like, 200 lines or fewer). Once it looks like it will either need an input other than a text file or grow to a significant length, I tend to rewrite in something else. However, for short log processing scripts, I've not found anything with even close to the same productivity.

pvaldes 7y ago

> I'm unclear why people continue to use Perl at all It does the job

ether_at_cpan 7y ago

> I'm unclear why people continue to use Perl at all Because there's a huge amount of applications and websites still built in it, and it's still a great language so new projects are written in it all the time. source: my very prosperous career, which has been almost entirely in Perl for the last 15 years