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But how how influential was it? It seems most of the unique ideas in Perl have not been adopted by other languages. But if Perl can be credited with kick start
by goto11 7y ago
But how how influential was it? It seems most of the unique ideas in Perl have not been adopted by other languages.
But if Perl can be credited with kick starting the dynamic language boom (Python, Ruby) then it have been massively influential.
- tyingq 7y agoI'd say it was pretty influential for Ruby, CGI-BIN, pcre, and other things that will live on in more refined forms. PHP has some obvious Perl influence as well. Edit: Maybe also Perl's Configure (crazy wide cross-platform portability) and CPAN. They were pretty ahead of their time.
- LeonidasXIV 7y agoWhile I agree that Perl influenced Ruby which I guess in turn influenced CoffeeScript and Elixir to some degree, the lineage of PHP seems to be dead. I don't really know any languages that are inspired by PHP itself, other than maybe Hack which one could argue is very closely related to PHP.
- tyingq 7y agoEven if the lineage dies with PHP, that pulls in Facebook and WordPress. Smarty could possibly take credit for inspiring some of the template engines out there also.
- atishay811 7y agoReact(Js framework) is close to PHP as a concept. Facebook's team had to take ideas from their exisitng code. With JSX, we could potentially call it a new language.
- nicoburns 7y agoE4X (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript_for_XML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript_for_XML) is also a likely inspiration for JSX.
- chipotle_coyote 7y agoI still write and actually still (sorta-kinda) like PHP, but there's no major concept/feature I can think of that's intrinsic to PHP rather than inherited from other languages. The Perl (and general "C-like language" influence is notable, and as PHP has matured it's started to feel ever more like Java. ("To write a simple PHP server app, first just initialize your PSR-11 compatible dependency injection container and add your PSR-7 compatible HTTP request/response handlers to it...")
- tyingq 7y agoThe mixed code/template capability seems to have led to JSX.
- mattkrause 7y agoI'd also give it some credit as a cautionary tale. A lot of subsequent languages have focused on readability, partly as a reaction to some of the....unique things came up with in Perl.
- goto11 7y agoYeah, the idea that programming languages should be more like human languages seemed promising at the time. Perl showed us that we definitely does not want that.
- tyingq 7y agoNot sure I understand that one. I know Larry Wall is a linguist. But there's not much about Perl, to me, that seems like a human language. If I dig into the gripes about the syntax, it's usually use of the implied $_ variable, wide use of sigils ($, @, %), derefs of complex data structures (hash of lists of hashes, etc) or regex syntax that people are talking about.
- ryl00 7y ago> derefs of complex data structures Am I the only one who finds perl data structures simple and consistent? Once I understood the difference between () and [] (or {} for hashes), it was easy (too easy, some might say!) to construct complex data structures.
- tyingq 7y agoCould partially be the TIMTOWTDI thing. People mixing: $foo->{bar}; $$foo{bar}; And quoting or not the key, etc. Slices and individual elements, etc. Probably looks like line noise to outsiders when you have a long one using parens to grab a specific array element, combined with $$ and so forth.
- WorldMaker 7y agoPlus many years of Bash script intended one-liners to replace or augment awk/sed leading a lot of Perl Golfers to a sublanguage that makes APL look far saner in comparison. That the code golf then shows up in "production scripts" and libraries (if for no other reason than muscle memory) builds a fortress wall to readability by outsiders.
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago>But how how influential was it? Raku (formerly known as "Perl 6"), PHP, Ruby and PowerShell were directly influenced by Perl.
- jeltz 7y agoCPAN is probably the biggest influence, it is the ancestor of most package managers used today. But Perl has also spread its dialect of regular expression and the idea of regular expression literals, plus it was hugely influential on Ruby which then have lived on in Elixir and Crystal. Also you may be correct about it kicking off the scripting languages' popularity, and as someone else mentioned it is also responsible for cgibin.
- mxyzpt1k 7y agoPerl incorporated regular expressions into a general purpose programming language in a way that seemed fairly unique at the time. Today they seem to be everywhere, often with the help of PCRE-Perl compatible regexps.
- Stranger43 7y agoThe problem with perl and this kind of list is that in reality it's just an elegant way of writing awk/sh scripts with proper flow control, i.e. like python today it was seen as an way to get around the compatibility and performance issues associated with shell/awk in the bad old days of commercial Unix. It might sound strange to modern eyes but there was an time when Perl was considered elegant and robust, but then again very few young people have ever experienced the horrors of trying to write portable shell code for commercial Unix, perl was on the other hand almost completely identical regardless of what variant of Unix you happened to be running, and vastly faster then sh/awk at a time when even expensive systems could be slow by modern standards. For modern day script writers Ruby and Python have all but replaced perl even though that's not stopping the enterprise from keeping their perl codebases alive and kicking for the foreseeable future, but even there it's being challenged from bellow by the fact that bash and gawk have become fairly universal on Linux systems and hardware fast enough that regex performance rarely matter.
- evgen 7y agoIn my mind what Perl brought to awk/sh was not flow control but rather data structures that did not make you want to kill yourself. Its standard library also delivered a lot of core sysadmin functionality back in the day and the reporting/output features fit very well with what was needed for early web CGI scripting.
- downerending 7y agoI think it would be fair to give Perl that credit. When it was first released, there really wasn't anything else like it. There was sh/csh, awk, sed, but nothing that really showed the path forward as Perl did. That said, once Python 1.5.2 (or so) hit, Perl was done for. It was simply better, and there was no reasonable way for Perl to recover the lead, or even really coexist. Perl had a lot of momentum and took many years to decline, but that was the tipping point, in my mind. It remains to be seen whether Python3 will displace Python2. :-)
- b2gills 7y agoYou do realize that there are more Perl programmers and more Perl code written today then there was back in '99 when Python 1.5.2 was released. Sure the percentage has gone down, but the count has gone up.