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I worked at a place like this and it was a nightmare. We had a few dedicated Perl programmers who swore there was nothing better since sliced bread, but there w

I worked at a place like this and it was a nightmare. We had a few dedicated Perl programmers who swore there was nothing better since sliced bread, but there were so many legacy Perl programs it spilled into everyone's responsibilities. I know for a fact everybody else absolutely hated having to go in and decipher decades old Perl code.

rrwo 4y ago
That's a problem with the codebase at your place of work, not the language.
juice_bus 4y ago
You could replace Perl with any language and people would have the same experience.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- vultour 4y ago
  Most other "popular" languages share a pretty good chunk of their syntax. You can dig through PHP/Java/C#/Go/Javascript/C++/Python pretty easily if you already know one of them. Perl and its magic variables are absolutely undecipherable if you haven't worked with the language before (or in a long time).
  - kamaal 4y ago
    >>Perl and its magic variables are absolutely undecipherable if you haven't worked with the language before (or in a long time). Yeah, either the language gives you magic variables, or you make your own one's in the programs you write. Programming isn't sorcery. Somebody has to write the code for features a language doesn't give you. That the is whole problem in essence, the more minimal your syntax goes, the more code you will write for features the language doesn't give you. Good part about the Perl magic variables is at least they are documented.
  - toast0 4y ago
    perldoc perlvar will tell you about all the magic variables.
  - rrwo 4y ago
    When I learned Perl, the syntax reminded me of C and bash. The magic variables are also from bash. Maybe because I knew C and some bash and awk, Perl wasn't alien to me at all. Coming from a Pascal and Java background, it was a breath of fresh air. Programming was actually fun.
darrenf 4y ago
> I know for a fact everybody else absolutely hated having to go in and decipher decades old Perl code. There's genuinely nothing I enjoy more at work than deciphering, debugging, documenting, and ultimately refactoring Perl code. Even if I'm improving it to extinction e.g. turning parts of a legacy stack into a service with an API, ready for a replacement in some other language to be swapped in.

rrwo 4y ago

That's a problem with the codebase at your place of work, not the language.

juice_bus 4y ago

You could replace Perl with any language and people would have the same experience.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
vultour 4y ago
Most other "popular" languages share a pretty good chunk of their syntax. You can dig through PHP/Java/C#/Go/Javascript/C++/Python pretty easily if you already know one of them. Perl and its magic variables are absolutely undecipherable if you haven't worked with the language before (or in a long time).
- kamaal 4y ago
  >>Perl and its magic variables are absolutely undecipherable if you haven't worked with the language before (or in a long time). Yeah, either the language gives you magic variables, or you make your own one's in the programs you write. Programming isn't sorcery. Somebody has to write the code for features a language doesn't give you. That the is whole problem in essence, the more minimal your syntax goes, the more code you will write for features the language doesn't give you. Good part about the Perl magic variables is at least they are documented.
- toast0 4y ago
  perldoc perlvar will tell you about all the magic variables.
- rrwo 4y ago
  When I learned Perl, the syntax reminded me of C and bash. The magic variables are also from bash. Maybe because I knew C and some bash and awk, Perl wasn't alien to me at all. Coming from a Pascal and Java background, it was a breath of fresh air. Programming was actually fun.

darrenf 4y ago

> I know for a fact everybody else absolutely hated having to go in and decipher decades old Perl code. There's genuinely nothing I enjoy more at work than deciphering, debugging, documenting, and ultimately refactoring Perl code. Even if I'm improving it to extinction e.g. turning parts of a legacy stack into a service with an API, ready for a replacement in some other language to be swapped in.