4 ms·

The only reason I know Perl is because I'm old enough to have started in the 90s when it was the new hotness. Starting today I'd obviously have learned JS or Go

by pram 5y ago

The only reason I know Perl is because I'm old enough to have started in the 90s when it was the new hotness. Starting today I'd obviously have learned JS or Go or Java or Rust or Python instead. Perl in 2021 probably seems like some curious antique like AWK, if they've even heard of it. That is the real problem I think. There is just no good reason to use it, and thus learn it. It doesn't do anything better than the alternatives. It's not "dead" but there is very little new blood entering the scene. It's a retirement home.

tyingq 5y ago
I imagine the old "Command Line Tools can be 235x faster than your Hadoop Cluster" story still applies. That is, there's probably a fair amount of data processing that could be done well with Perl (or awk, etc).
bluedino 5y ago
>> The only reason I know Perl is because I'm old enough to have started in the 90s when it was the new hotness. It was _the_ choice to use to write web pages in at one point. I remember installing RedHat Linux, writing a support 'forum' message board thing in Perl, then chucking it away as everyone was starting to use ColdFusion, PHP and .NET
- cyberge99 5y ago
  CGI was the way back then (still is in a way).
oneweekwonder 5y ago
> Perl in 2021 probably seems like some curious antique like AWK Sure you can call awk an antique tool being 44 years old, but its available on almost all unix-like systems even on router running busybox or bare minimum containers using alphine. So its definitely a personal nitpick of mine calling a very relevant tool an antique.
- shagie 5y ago
  Somewhere, I've got a book for programming awk. It's got some really neat things in there that are non-trivial awk scripts from yesteryear. I could see that being useful in the 70s or 80s... but not today. No-one writes awk more than a line or two today that's nestled in some ci script that is never looked at again. Yes, the tool is ubiquitous - its everywhere. It also happens to be part of the standard of what is on a machine which keeps it being used for those two liners. However, people aren't writing applications in awk anymore. Similarly, perl is going to go the same way. It's going to be useful for those 10-20 line data transformations that are in some data pipeline for munging data. But its not something that's continuing to grow and find its way as a first choice. Writing a new application in awk is something that people do for the exercise - much like going and doing your own primitive photography with a cyanotype. It's done as a "yes, I understand it enough to do this complex thing." Perl is a bit further back... it's developing your own film. There are still some people who do that as a matter of their business - but its not a first choice anymore. Cyanotypes and doing your own darkroom work are things of antiques in today's age. They're not gone - but doing things in them is more like going to the pioneer town and seeing how it used to be done rather than a practical choice for today.
  - mywittyname 5y ago
    Applications in awk? No. It's still a popular tool in the data processing realm. It's crazy to think that bash scripts using pipes is still one of the most memory efficient ways of processing file-based data. Even tools like Apache Airflow just went ahead and incorporated bash for this exact reason.
    - shagie 5y ago
      In the back of this 80s book that I've got somewhere there's a set of programs that are 5-7 printed pages long... and written entirely in awk. A short example of that type of thing - https://people.sc.fsu.edu/~sshanbhag/awk-shell/histogram.awk https://people.sc.fsu.edu/~sshanbhag/awk-shell/histogram.awk For the time, that was likely a very reasonable solution. But for today's world, there are better solutions.

by pram 5y ago

tyingq 5y ago

I imagine the old "Command Line Tools can be 235x faster than your Hadoop Cluster" story still applies. That is, there's probably a fair amount of data processing that could be done well with Perl (or awk, etc).

bluedino 5y ago

>> The only reason I know Perl is because I'm old enough to have started in the 90s when it was the new hotness. It was _the_ choice to use to write web pages in at one point. I remember installing RedHat Linux, writing a support 'forum' message board thing in Perl, then chucking it away as everyone was starting to use ColdFusion, PHP and .NET

cyberge99 5y ago
CGI was the way back then (still is in a way).

oneweekwonder 5y ago

> Perl in 2021 probably seems like some curious antique like AWK Sure you can call awk an antique tool being 44 years old, but its available on almost all unix-like systems even on router running busybox or bare minimum containers using alphine. So its definitely a personal nitpick of mine calling a very relevant tool an antique.

shagie 5y ago
Somewhere, I've got a book for programming awk. It's got some really neat things in there that are non-trivial awk scripts from yesteryear. I could see that being useful in the 70s or 80s... but not today. No-one writes awk more than a line or two today that's nestled in some ci script that is never looked at again. Yes, the tool is ubiquitous - its everywhere. It also happens to be part of the standard of what is on a machine which keeps it being used for those two liners. However, people aren't writing applications in awk anymore. Similarly, perl is going to go the same way. It's going to be useful for those 10-20 line data transformations that are in some data pipeline for munging data. But its not something that's continuing to grow and find its way as a first choice. Writing a new application in awk is something that people do for the exercise - much like going and doing your own primitive photography with a cyanotype. It's done as a "yes, I understand it enough to do this complex thing." Perl is a bit further back... it's developing your own film. There are still some people who do that as a matter of their business - but its not a first choice anymore. Cyanotypes and doing your own darkroom work are things of antiques in today's age. They're not gone - but doing things in them is more like going to the pioneer town and seeing how it used to be done rather than a practical choice for today.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  Applications in awk? No. It's still a popular tool in the data processing realm. It's crazy to think that bash scripts using pipes is still one of the most memory efficient ways of processing file-based data. Even tools like Apache Airflow just went ahead and incorporated bash for this exact reason.
  - shagie 5y ago
    In the back of this 80s book that I've got somewhere there's a set of programs that are 5-7 printed pages long... and written entirely in awk. A short example of that type of thing - https://people.sc.fsu.edu/~sshanbhag/awk-shell/histogram.awk https://people.sc.fsu.edu/~sshanbhag/awk-shell/histogram.awk For the time, that was likely a very reasonable solution. But for today's world, there are better solutions.