4 ms·

I think Perl today is probably closer to COBOL it was massive for a time, felt like it was everywhere. Nowadays it is increasingly niche. Like COBOL there is s

I think Perl today is probably closer to COBOL it was massive for a time, felt like it was everywhere. Nowadays it is increasingly niche. Like COBOL there is still a lot of perl code out in the wild.

xarope 2y ago
time to brush up my perl. Requires some zen'ess and flow time to grok the #@[]{} again...
- kevindamm 2y ago
  It's been over a decade for me but I remember the # for tables and @ for arrays not being that hard to decipher, it was the "where is this $_ referring to at this point?" kind of puzzles that would stump me, especially when pattern matching application implicitly uses it too.
  - skipkey 2y ago
    A pretty good rule of thumb was always, $_ is most likely the thing you need it to be. Oh, there are exceptions, but in my experience they were generally caused by code that had been made inappropriately clever.
bigiain 2y ago
Perl footgunned itself with the Perl5/Perl6/Raku and almost 2 decades between major releases debacle. I wrote a _lot_ of Perl, starting with Perl4 cgi scripts in the mid 90s, then Perl5 and FastCGI and Apache ModPerl. I loved it as a language. But by the time I left that gig in 2008, nobody wanted Perl any more. I mostly drifted around PHP, Python, Ruby, and Javascript for a few years until moving away from full time coding and up (sideways?) into leadership and mentoring roles. Interestingly I got _into_ the Perl gig when I bailed on a COBOL maintenance gig where it was clear nobody was at all interested in listening to how their 10+ year old custom COBOL warehouse management app (written by the company the boss's sister used to own) running on EOLed Wang minicomputers - was completely incapable of dealing with 4 digit dates for Y2K. I jumped ship to make that somebody else's problem.
- codr7 2y ago
  I lost interest long before Raku, Parrot was a wild ride :)
enriquto 2y ago
> Nowadays it is increasingly niche. Still, if you buy a brand new mac today, most of the executable scripts in the system are written in perl. You can check it yourself by running: file -bL /bin/* /usr/bin/* | cut -d' ' -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n As of 2024, macOS is essentially a Perl operation.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  The bad thing with using a proper language like Perl for admin scripts is that they will degenerate into programs. The good thing with Bash etc is that they are so bad you wont and when you do it anyway atleast you get some whip lashes for it.
  - anthk 2y ago
    There are good programs written in Perl. PangZero, Synaptic, most of Debian config tools...
  - layer8 2y ago
    The problem is that Bash also isn’t really great for admin scripts.
chihuahua 2y ago
When I used to work for ZipRecruiter in 22-23, much of their codebase was Perl. Pretty mind-boggling. There were even people working on it who would construct arguments why it was a perfectly reasonable language for ongoing software development. But some VP put his foot down and said "no more new projects in Perl!" and they started using Go for new projects.

I think Perl today is probably closer to COBOL it was massive for a time, felt like it was everywhere. Nowadays it is increasingly niche. Like COBOL there is still a lot of perl code out in the wild.

xarope 2y ago

time to brush up my perl. Requires some zen'ess and flow time to grok the #@[]{} again...

kevindamm 2y ago
It's been over a decade for me but I remember the # for tables and @ for arrays not being that hard to decipher, it was the "where is this $_ referring to at this point?" kind of puzzles that would stump me, especially when pattern matching application implicitly uses it too.
- skipkey 2y ago
  A pretty good rule of thumb was always, $_ is most likely the thing you need it to be. Oh, there are exceptions, but in my experience they were generally caused by code that had been made inappropriately clever.

bigiain 2y ago

Perl footgunned itself with the Perl5/Perl6/Raku and almost 2 decades between major releases debacle. I wrote a _lot_ of Perl, starting with Perl4 cgi scripts in the mid 90s, then Perl5 and FastCGI and Apache ModPerl. I loved it as a language. But by the time I left that gig in 2008, nobody wanted Perl any more. I mostly drifted around PHP, Python, Ruby, and Javascript for a few years until moving away from full time coding and up (sideways?) into leadership and mentoring roles. Interestingly I got _into_ the Perl gig when I bailed on a COBOL maintenance gig where it was clear nobody was at all interested in listening to how their 10+ year old custom COBOL warehouse management app (written by the company the boss's sister used to own) running on EOLed Wang minicomputers - was completely incapable of dealing with 4 digit dates for Y2K. I jumped ship to make that somebody else's problem.

codr7 2y ago
I lost interest long before Raku, Parrot was a wild ride :)

enriquto 2y ago

> Nowadays it is increasingly niche. Still, if you buy a brand new mac today, most of the executable scripts in the system are written in perl. You can check it yourself by running: file -bL /bin/* /usr/bin/* | cut -d' ' -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n As of 2024, macOS is essentially a Perl operation.

rightbyte 2y ago
The bad thing with using a proper language like Perl for admin scripts is that they will degenerate into programs. The good thing with Bash etc is that they are so bad you wont and when you do it anyway atleast you get some whip lashes for it.
- anthk 2y ago
  There are good programs written in Perl. PangZero, Synaptic, most of Debian config tools...
- layer8 2y ago
  The problem is that Bash also isn’t really great for admin scripts.

chihuahua 2y ago

When I used to work for ZipRecruiter in 22-23, much of their codebase was Perl. Pretty mind-boggling. There were even people working on it who would construct arguments why it was a perfectly reasonable language for ongoing software development. But some VP put his foot down and said "no more new projects in Perl!" and they started using Go for new projects.