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Perl 5. Perl 4 was a great upgrade to bash as a scripting language. Perl 5 added a bunch of complexity to remake Perl into a programming language. It failed.
by eikenberry 11mo ago
Perl 5.
Perl 4 was a great upgrade to bash as a scripting language.
Perl 5 added a bunch of complexity to remake Perl into a programming language.
It failed.
Perl 4 was a great scripting language whereas Perl 5 was a terrible programing language.
Perl 5 lost to the better (dynamic) programming languages and bash reclaimed the scripting title as Perl 4 was dead.
- worik 11mo agoNo. I came to Perl when Perl 4 was the latest. I was using it as a frame work for distributed computing, moving data between machines. I was on the point of throwing it all away for C++ when Perl5 came out. I forget the details, but it made everything possible, and did not get in my way like Perl 4 did.
- ajb 11mo agoInteresting take! I wasn't around for perl 4. I didn't like perl 5, but I was quite interested in 6 at the start. For a moment it looked like Larry Wall had really reflected on the problems of perl 5, and was going to make a new language that was at once cleaner and more systematic, even though it had more features. Then he kept adding more shiny things and I lost interest.