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I'm surprised to learn that Perl is still used. Obviously there will always be legacy code to maintain but these days I can't even remember the last time Perl w

I'm surprised to learn that Perl is still used. Obviously there will always be legacy code to maintain but these days I can't even remember the last time Perl was mentioned in casual conversation amongst my peers unless we're sharing war stories from the 90s. These days when we find ourselves needing to write a script our first go-to would be bash, and if we need more features or if it's going to be complex enough to have to worry about maintenance costs we'd probably reach for python. TIL that there is a non-profit foundation that focuses, in part, on supporting Perl. That surprises me to the same extent that I would be surprised to learn that there is a foundation aimed at supporting VB6 (though now watch someone is going to share that there is).

lizknope 2y ago
Most of my coworkers above age 45 still use Perl. I am constantly parsing reports and then generating commands to run from that. I learned Perl in the 90's and it still works great for that. I have to code in Tcl for most of our EDA tools (chip design) but I still parse reports in Perl. The younger engineers use Python and I've learned enough but I really don't care. I'm not writing big systems or anything in Perl or Python. It's the Tcl code that has tens of thousands of lines because that is what the tools require.
- cafard 2y ago
  I was about to say, Hey, I use Perl, but then I saw this posting with the over 45 qualification. Yep, that's me (way over). Honestly, I write about a script a quarter in Perl, but it definitely is handy now and then.
  - gertlex 2y ago
    Curious: do you also do script-writing in other languages? And just pull out perl for a subset of problems? Or are most things at the "bigger than a script" level for you? I'm not here to judge. I still prefer to write my python scripts like it's the 2.7 days... (more effort goes to python "code")
    - cafard 2y ago
      Generally, if the script is more than a one-off, I will write in Python, since all the young seem to know Python, and very few seem to know Perl. There are two recurring jobs that I have not rewritten from Perl, one because "pack" is so handy. The only other language I use much for scripting is Javascript, or rather Jscript, for our accounting department sometimes needs files munged for integration into Great Plains, and I can count on cscript being on the machine and running such scripts.
      - kamaal 2y ago
        >>since all the young seem to know Python 'I know Perl' people != 'I know Python' people Perl was/is just so powerful, people have used to do all kinds of things that most people probably don't even have idea can be done. Its some what similar to the power of macros in vim/emacs. People(especially young) are often surprised you can just open vim on a ec2 instance and do something in 30 seconds, they were planning to spend hours/days doing using java+bash or something. I have both seen and done, people build such extreme, big and hard things with Perl and so quickly, that I'm sure somebody without that context would find it hard to imagine. Im sure you can do in Python, anything you can do in Perl. But definitely not in the same time, not the same size and more importantly- not often. Programming culture has been trading tool power for beginners ease for decades now, and the market is swamped with tools that appeal and work only for beginners not for advanced users. In its hey days Perl programmers would do things in a weekend, what the neighbouring Java team had 12 people and a year to do. There is a reason so much was built in Perl in those days. But like most things, money increased, people had lots of time and budget to get things done. Beginner tools got used more often. Perl also got its reputation as a hard to use tool around that time. But honestly I see so much manual drudgery these days. Its irritating to see that as a Perl programmer. There is nothing more sad that watching people do work, that must be done by a program.
        dazed_confused 2y ago
        You're last line is why Larry Wall made Perl. I feel you!
      - 2y ago
- oldpersonintx 2y ago
  [dead]
leejo 2y ago
> I'm surprised to learn that Perl is still used. For this year's London Perl & Raku workshop I shortlisted 70 companies to look for sponsorship. That was with minimal research and effort. These ranged from long term ("legacy") users of Perl to startups. From small companies to very large and profitable fintechs. I cover this briefly in the talk I gave at the end of the workshop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el7qHRpEDeE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el7qHRpEDeE Yes, there is far less Perl than there was 20 years ago. But Perl was everywhere at one point, and the halflife of programming languages is long so it's still in a lot of places. Programming languages don't die, they just stop being talked about in favour of the shiny new ones.
- gspencley 2y ago
  > Programming languages don't die, they just stop being talked about in favour of the shiny new ones. You're largely preaching to the choir, I don't disagree with anything you said. As a web application developer who got started professionally in the 1990s, I not only vividly remember Perl being everywhere, I actively wrote a lot of it. However, in my more recent experience, it is more likely to hear people talk about COBOL, FORTRAN or C++ than it is to discuss Perl. All of those languages predate Perl. Java also still gets a ton of discussion and it's not shiny and new anymore. Most of us who spent time writing and maintaining Perl in the 1990s were all too willing to abandon it in favour of other languages with similar features, not because they were shiny and new but because of major pain points with Perl (it earned the meme that it's a write-only language). In my opinion, Perl's greatest contribution and staying power was it's regex engine and syntax which persists. I don't even like python, for what it's worth, but it's popular for more reasons than it just being "shiny and new" (to the extent that you can even say that about python these days).
  - leejo 2y ago
    I don't disagree with anything you've said either, in fact I've blogged about this at length: http://leejo.github.io/2017/12/17/tpc_and_the_end_of_language_dominance/ http://leejo.github.io/2017/12/17/tpc_and_the_end_of_languag... My main issue is that "People still use Perl?" has essentially become a meme at this point. I'm relatively sure that any sufficiently commented on or upvoted thread on HN gets that statement in it somewhere. Yes, Perl is still used. Extensively. People and companies just don't talk about it. That's the problem with Perl these days. (Personally I think TAP and CPAN were Perl's greatest contributions, as I was never a heavy user of regexp).
whiplash451 2y ago
You'd be surprised to see how much COBOL is still used as well then.
kqr 2y ago
In contrast to other people, I'm fairly young (low 30s) and I use Perl a lot. I've outlined my reasoning before[1] but it boils down to (a) very quick to get going, (b) runs everwhere I care about, (c) great compatibility story, and (d) can scale up to large applications in a pinch. [1]: https://entropicthoughts.com/why-perl https://entropicthoughts.com/why-perl
worik 2y ago
> these days I can't even remember the last time Perl was mentioned in casual conversation amongst my peers You need better peers
markstos 2y ago
DuckDuckGo is written in Perl. As a business decision, it's cheaper to keep Perl working then replace it.
koito17 2y ago
Practically all Japanese BBS in use today are written in Perl. They are either proprietary CGI scripts or a proprietary fork of an open-source software like WebPatio[0] and Zero-channel Plus[1]. [0] https://www.kent-web.com/bbs/patio.html https://www.kent-web.com/bbs/patio.html [1] https://ja.osdn.net/projects/zerochplus/ https://ja.osdn.net/projects/zerochplus/
toast0 2y ago
> these days I can't even remember the last time Perl was mentioned in casual conversation amongst my peers I mean, what's there to talk about? It's there, it works, not an exciting subject. It's like municipal water (if you have it), it's indespensible, but what is there to say about it. (Unless it has stuff in it you don't want) I did get some flack for writing a perl script for work recently, but I had some rubbish to list, and it does the job quite well.

lizknope 2y ago

Most of my coworkers above age 45 still use Perl. I am constantly parsing reports and then generating commands to run from that. I learned Perl in the 90's and it still works great for that. I have to code in Tcl for most of our EDA tools (chip design) but I still parse reports in Perl. The younger engineers use Python and I've learned enough but I really don't care. I'm not writing big systems or anything in Perl or Python. It's the Tcl code that has tens of thousands of lines because that is what the tools require.

cafard 2y ago
I was about to say, Hey, I use Perl, but then I saw this posting with the over 45 qualification. Yep, that's me (way over). Honestly, I write about a script a quarter in Perl, but it definitely is handy now and then.
- gertlex 2y ago
  Curious: do you also do script-writing in other languages? And just pull out perl for a subset of problems? Or are most things at the "bigger than a script" level for you? I'm not here to judge. I still prefer to write my python scripts like it's the 2.7 days... (more effort goes to python "code")
  - cafard 2y ago
    Generally, if the script is more than a one-off, I will write in Python, since all the young seem to know Python, and very few seem to know Perl. There are two recurring jobs that I have not rewritten from Perl, one because "pack" is so handy. The only other language I use much for scripting is Javascript, or rather Jscript, for our accounting department sometimes needs files munged for integration into Great Plains, and I can count on cscript being on the machine and running such scripts.
    - kamaal 2y ago
      >>since all the young seem to know Python 'I know Perl' people != 'I know Python' people Perl was/is just so powerful, people have used to do all kinds of things that most people probably don't even have idea can be done. Its some what similar to the power of macros in vim/emacs. People(especially young) are often surprised you can just open vim on a ec2 instance and do something in 30 seconds, they were planning to spend hours/days doing using java+bash or something. I have both seen and done, people build such extreme, big and hard things with Perl and so quickly, that I'm sure somebody without that context would find it hard to imagine. Im sure you can do in Python, anything you can do in Perl. But definitely not in the same time, not the same size and more importantly- not often. Programming culture has been trading tool power for beginners ease for decades now, and the market is swamped with tools that appeal and work only for beginners not for advanced users. In its hey days Perl programmers would do things in a weekend, what the neighbouring Java team had 12 people and a year to do. There is a reason so much was built in Perl in those days. But like most things, money increased, people had lots of time and budget to get things done. Beginner tools got used more often. Perl also got its reputation as a hard to use tool around that time. But honestly I see so much manual drudgery these days. Its irritating to see that as a Perl programmer. There is nothing more sad that watching people do work, that must be done by a program.
      - dazed_confused 2y ago
        You're last line is why Larry Wall made Perl. I feel you!
    - 2y ago
oldpersonintx 2y ago
[dead]

leejo 2y ago

> I'm surprised to learn that Perl is still used. For this year's London Perl & Raku workshop I shortlisted 70 companies to look for sponsorship. That was with minimal research and effort. These ranged from long term ("legacy") users of Perl to startups. From small companies to very large and profitable fintechs. I cover this briefly in the talk I gave at the end of the workshop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el7qHRpEDeE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el7qHRpEDeE Yes, there is far less Perl than there was 20 years ago. But Perl was everywhere at one point, and the halflife of programming languages is long so it's still in a lot of places. Programming languages don't die, they just stop being talked about in favour of the shiny new ones.

gspencley 2y ago
> Programming languages don't die, they just stop being talked about in favour of the shiny new ones. You're largely preaching to the choir, I don't disagree with anything you said. As a web application developer who got started professionally in the 1990s, I not only vividly remember Perl being everywhere, I actively wrote a lot of it. However, in my more recent experience, it is more likely to hear people talk about COBOL, FORTRAN or C++ than it is to discuss Perl. All of those languages predate Perl. Java also still gets a ton of discussion and it's not shiny and new anymore. Most of us who spent time writing and maintaining Perl in the 1990s were all too willing to abandon it in favour of other languages with similar features, not because they were shiny and new but because of major pain points with Perl (it earned the meme that it's a write-only language). In my opinion, Perl's greatest contribution and staying power was it's regex engine and syntax which persists. I don't even like python, for what it's worth, but it's popular for more reasons than it just being "shiny and new" (to the extent that you can even say that about python these days).
- leejo 2y ago
  I don't disagree with anything you've said either, in fact I've blogged about this at length: http://leejo.github.io/2017/12/17/tpc_and_the_end_of_language_dominance/ http://leejo.github.io/2017/12/17/tpc_and_the_end_of_languag... My main issue is that "People still use Perl?" has essentially become a meme at this point. I'm relatively sure that any sufficiently commented on or upvoted thread on HN gets that statement in it somewhere. Yes, Perl is still used. Extensively. People and companies just don't talk about it. That's the problem with Perl these days. (Personally I think TAP and CPAN were Perl's greatest contributions, as I was never a heavy user of regexp).

whiplash451 2y ago

You'd be surprised to see how much COBOL is still used as well then.

kqr 2y ago

In contrast to other people, I'm fairly young (low 30s) and I use Perl a lot. I've outlined my reasoning before[1] but it boils down to (a) very quick to get going, (b) runs everwhere I care about, (c) great compatibility story, and (d) can scale up to large applications in a pinch. [1]: https://entropicthoughts.com/why-perl https://entropicthoughts.com/why-perl

worik 2y ago

> these days I can't even remember the last time Perl was mentioned in casual conversation amongst my peers You need better peers

markstos 2y ago

DuckDuckGo is written in Perl. As a business decision, it's cheaper to keep Perl working then replace it.

koito17 2y ago

Practically all Japanese BBS in use today are written in Perl. They are either proprietary CGI scripts or a proprietary fork of an open-source software like WebPatio[0] and Zero-channel Plus[1]. [0] https://www.kent-web.com/bbs/patio.html https://www.kent-web.com/bbs/patio.html [1] https://ja.osdn.net/projects/zerochplus/ https://ja.osdn.net/projects/zerochplus/

toast0 2y ago

> these days I can't even remember the last time Perl was mentioned in casual conversation amongst my peers I mean, what's there to talk about? It's there, it works, not an exciting subject. It's like municipal water (if you have it), it's indespensible, but what is there to say about it. (Unless it has stuff in it you don't want) I did get some flack for writing a perl script for work recently, but I had some rubbish to list, and it does the job quite well.