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I have a problem. I know, I'll post a dismissive, overly reductive platitude and farm points on HN. Perl 5 is a great language far ahead of it's time, it's ext
by arcfour 11mo ago
I have a problem. I know, I'll post a dismissive, overly reductive platitude and farm points on HN.
Perl 5 is a great language far ahead of it's time, it's extremely functional, and it still underpins many large and important systems to this day. No, it's not perfect, but it's the first time programming where I ever felt like I was having fun writing the code as opposed to achieving a means to an end.
I admittedly have no experience with Perl 7 and didn't like Raku. Sometimes worse is better.
- spudlyo 11mo agoIf you step back and cross your eyes, Perl, Python, and Ruby are more similar than they are different.
- nabla9 11mo agoPerl 5 was abandoned for a reason by people who developed it. Something I you never see happen in other languages. Planned successors did not catch up. Perl does not scale. Very few people want to maintain Perl code. The write only reputation is not without merit.
- arcfour 11mo agoIt is without merit. There are more than a handful of modern internet companies running on Perl. Amazon runs a LOT of Perl for CDO. Who has scaled more than Amazon? This is a very ignorant take that selectively chooses to look at the fact that you can write Perl poorly, because the language does not stop you from doing so, and ignores the fact that you can also write it in a maintainable fashion. People stopped working on Perl for a variety of reasons. The commitment to backwards compatibility to a fault. The reputation leading to lower adoption. And so on. None of these are structural problems with the language itself, they are more community/bad luck issues.
- ok123456 11mo ago"I have a problem. I know, I'll use Perl. Now I have two problems." Is an old Perl joke from the 90s.
- cowboylowrez 11mo agoI like the java version "problem factory"