5 ms·
I wonder if you've hit on a major factor of Perl's decline. Like you say much of Perl's power was leveraging existing unix utilities, the whole duck tape develo
by blacktriangle 6y ago
I wonder if you've hit on a major factor of Perl's decline. Like you say much of Perl's power was leveraging existing unix utilities, the whole duck tape development thing. As more developers started growing up on windows and then macs, fewer developers had knowledge of the tools to tie together. Without the unix tools to tie together, perl's value proposition drops.
- jes 6y agoI think that may be part of it. For example, if grep (1) doesn't already mean something to a person, they probably won't have an immediate idea about what the grep function in Perl is all about.
- daotoad 6y agoI believe this is a major reason. Demographic shift. Perl grew to prominence when being a creole of C, shell, sed, awk, and lisp was an advantage. Anyone who might reasonably use it would be familiar with at least a few of these tools. Now, we live in a very different world. JavaScript is the new BASIC. Everyone has JsBASIC installed on their (virtual) machines. So that's what people learn on their own. Python and Java are closer to JS so, the transition is easier (at least superficially--I could argue that JS and Perl a lot in common, designwise).
- sea6ear 6y agoI think a related factor is the shift from raw text to databases. Perl's text oriented tools shine (obviously) when there is a lot of text to deal with. There was a lot of that at the dawn of the web. However, the rise of database backed web apps gradually removed a lot of the need for the special magic that Perl brought to the table.