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On my Linux system I could, if I wanted to, write programs in (the subset of bash that is) Bourne shell, awk, plain old 1970s vintage C, implement text filters
by MarkusWandel 5y ago
On my Linux system I could, if I wanted to, write programs in (the subset of bash that is) Bourne shell, awk, plain old 1970s vintage C, implement text filters in sed... all these are antique things that don't need a vibrant user community. They just need to work well enough to support existing stuff written in them, and for an occasional quickie script by old farts who know how to use them.
Why should Perl be any different? It'll be decades before a practical system won't have a Perl 5 compatible /bin/perl on it. So if I know Perl well enough that I can hack something up in 5 minutes, and Perl is there and works, how is it alive or dead? It just is. And that suits me just fine.
- mongol 5y agoGood point. The alive / dead metaphor is not so useful to descibe the language itself. Perhaps it is the community that should be described as alive or dead. The language itself is just a tool. It never was alive, but as long as it works, it is useful for those that choose to use it. Just like a hammer can be useful long after the toolsmith that made it died.