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I bet some younger HN readers are looking at this and wondering if the popularity off Perl at this point is primarily sentimental associations that older devs h

• tashi 7y ago
  I disagree completely, but I'll accept that that's partly a matter of taste. But the thing that shocks me most about how completely Perl has fallen out of fashion is that nowadays sysadmins will write a hundred-line bash script rather than a five-line Perl script because of the theory that Perl is hard to read.
  • gerikson 7y ago
    That could be, but I've also noticed a sort of purism where the shell script is ideal because it can be run on any system. (Of course, using bash for the shell isn't a good choice because you can't rely on bash being installed). Personally I reach for Perl as soon as any sort of arithmetic is involved. And even if starting with find(1) is the first choice, it's worth getting to know modules like File::Find because they're way more powerful.
    • shagie 7y ago
      It is unfortunate that those sysadmins are then failing to just go full on awk then rather than those shell scripts. Even alpine has awk installed. docker run --rm alpine awk
      • boring_twenties 7y ago
        alpine doesn't "have awk installed," it's just that BusyBox that has an awk implementation. For real GNU awk you have to install the gawk package.