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I was a Perl coder, it was my first commercial job. I remember being excited for Perl 6. But looking back at it in retrospect after years, I'd now put it in the
by JulianMorrison 6y ago
I was a Perl coder, it was my first commercial job. I remember being excited for Perl 6. But looking back at it in retrospect after years, I'd now put it in the category of "languages that have a gimmick", something they follow too faithfully because it initially seems clever.
Perl's gimmick was "we had this text processing language based on linguistics theory, and we hung stuff off the side until it became a proper language". What the result was, really, was something that went through text like a swiss army chainsaw, but was a damn clunky mess doing real language stuff. Even if it was, for the time, pretty damn neat in its overall list of features. This neatness gradually paled as everything else caught up and surpassed it.
Nothing since has changed this. Raku still has the gimmicky feel - because that is what defines it as (a) Perl.
There are simply better syntaxes - better, even, nowadays, for text processing and sysadmin, where I'd reach for Ruby. And if I'm not too fond of Python, at least it's mostly uncomplicated.
I think at this point you can stick a fork in it, the gimmick has run its course, it's done.
- dkarl 6y agoI think it was more than a gimmick. It scaled down brilliantly. For people who mastered it, it was an incredibly powerful command-line tool, and it worked well enough for small scripts. It scaled up horribly. It showed its weaknesses in larger scripts, and it was gratuitously bad at any scale above that. And of course, as a bundle of idioms with no surface coherence and no unifying logical principles, it was grotesquely hostile to anyone who had not spent a lot of time immersed in it. But as a tool for command-line wizardry and small-scale scripting, for tasks that didn't need to be shared or maintained outside the priesthood of sysadmins, it was brilliant, and it hasn't been bested or even equaled as far as I know. I think the only reason it fell out of favor is that you can never be sure that a task won't grow beyond this little realm where Perl shines.
- JulianMorrison 6y agoRuby is about on a par for one-liners, since it copied a lot of Perl's convenience features like auto loops over lines of stdin.