3 ms·

some, but not all. There's a bunch of historical code which means that Perl is in the base install, but modern tooling has a lot of Python too, as well as POSIX

some, but not all. There's a bunch of historical code which means that Perl is in the base install, but modern tooling has a lot of Python too, as well as POSIX shell (not bash).

alfiedotwtf 2y ago
Though a lot of the apt tooling is definitely written in Perl the last time I had to deep dive
- johnisgood 2y ago
  And a lot of OpenBSD-related stuff is written in Perl, too. I do not think it is a bad thing at all.
  - alfiedotwtf 2y ago
    I absolutely love Perl. I'm just so sad Python won because Google blessed it as a language and at the time everyone wanted to work for Google. Perl always gets hate on HN, but I actually wonder of those commenter, who has actually spent over a single hours using Perl after they've read the Camel book. Honest opinion: if you're going to be spending time in Linux in your career, then you should read the Camel book at least once. Then and only then should you get to have an opinion on Perl!
    - freedomben 2y ago
      I mostly agree with you, though I do think Perl is genuinely harder to read than many other languages. Perl was often my goto for scripts before I learned Ruby (which has many glorious perl-isms in it even if most rubyists nowadays don't know or want to acknowledge that :-D ), and even looking back at some of my own code and knowing what it does, I have to read it a lot slower and more carefully than most other langs. Perl to me feels wonderfully optimized for writing, sometimes at the expense of reading. I love Perl's power and expressiveness, especially the string processing libs, and while I appreciate the flexibility in how many different ways there are to do things, it does mean that Perl code written by someone else with different approaches can sometimes be difficult to grok. For my own scripts I don't care about any of those issues and I often optimize for writing anyway, but there are plenty of applications where I would recommend against Perl, despite my affection for it. And yes agree, people should read the camel book!
      - johnisgood 2y ago
        > there are plenty of applications where I would recommend against Perl Yes of course, I would not write any type of servers in Perl, I would pick Go or Elixir or Erlang for such an use-case.

some, but not all. There's a bunch of historical code which means that Perl is in the base install, but modern tooling has a lot of Python too, as well as POSIX shell (not bash).

alfiedotwtf 2y ago

Though a lot of the apt tooling is definitely written in Perl the last time I had to deep dive

johnisgood 2y ago
And a lot of OpenBSD-related stuff is written in Perl, too. I do not think it is a bad thing at all.
- alfiedotwtf 2y ago
  I absolutely love Perl. I'm just so sad Python won because Google blessed it as a language and at the time everyone wanted to work for Google. Perl always gets hate on HN, but I actually wonder of those commenter, who has actually spent over a single hours using Perl after they've read the Camel book. Honest opinion: if you're going to be spending time in Linux in your career, then you should read the Camel book at least once. Then and only then should you get to have an opinion on Perl!
  - freedomben 2y ago
    I mostly agree with you, though I do think Perl is genuinely harder to read than many other languages. Perl was often my goto for scripts before I learned Ruby (which has many glorious perl-isms in it even if most rubyists nowadays don't know or want to acknowledge that :-D ), and even looking back at some of my own code and knowing what it does, I have to read it a lot slower and more carefully than most other langs. Perl to me feels wonderfully optimized for writing, sometimes at the expense of reading. I love Perl's power and expressiveness, especially the string processing libs, and while I appreciate the flexibility in how many different ways there are to do things, it does mean that Perl code written by someone else with different approaches can sometimes be difficult to grok. For my own scripts I don't care about any of those issues and I often optimize for writing anyway, but there are plenty of applications where I would recommend against Perl, despite my affection for it. And yes agree, people should read the camel book!
    - johnisgood 2y ago
      > there are plenty of applications where I would recommend against Perl Yes of course, I would not write any type of servers in Perl, I would pick Go or Elixir or Erlang for such an use-case.