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There was a brief period of schools teaching Java compiling down to CLI programs in Unix (beans?). Perl was popular on the semiconductor world replacing tcl for

There was a brief period of schools teaching Java compiling down to CLI programs in Unix (beans?). Perl was popular on the semiconductor world replacing tcl for gluing together complex manufacturing flows. Ruby was heading to be a replacement for Perl with bidirectional file handles and similar syntax. Shell scrips and Perl are still on use there. Python never made inroads because it brought nothing new and was less suited to file munging than Perl. Perl still has superior text manipulation semantics compared to python.

jandrewrogers 3y ago
Text manipulation was Perl’s raison d’être, it was exceptional at it. The real legacy of Perl is how pervasive its text manipulation concepts have become in other software. That was what made it work so well in the early days of the Web: everything Web was text-based. Perl would probably still have a place at the table if Perl 6 hadn’t turned into a debacle over an astonishing number of years.