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I had an itch to give Perl another go after a 5 year hiatus. I wanted a super simple way to spawn a proxy I was building in Go, along with writing various integ
by dillon 5mo ago
I had an itch to give Perl another go after a 5 year hiatus. I wanted a super simple way to spawn a proxy I was building in Go, along with writing various integration tests. I used Claude Code to write the bulk of it and found Claude to be remarkable good at Perl. I told Claude to only use what’s built into Perl’s standard library rather than reaching for anything in CPAN. Turns out everything from HTTP clients, TLS and JSON are all builtin which makes it a very stable and easy way to replace what I would normally have implemented in shell scripts. My theory is because Perl hasn’t changed all that much and has a ton of training data that Claude is actually quite good at Perl for cases where you might think to write shell scripts.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- hiAndrewQuinn 5mo agoMany are saying this! https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/llms-make-perl-great-again/ https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/llms-make-perl-great-again...
- imhoguy 5mo agoPlus Perl has very efficient minimal syntax, with "Perl golf" training set it is almost like ascii bytecode for LLMs.
- obelos 5mo agoI'm not sure it's really from the lack of change, though. I've used Claude, Kimi, and other LLMs to write a ton of Perl that's jacked up with weird sugaring packages like Moose and Function::Parameters with reified types, and they seem to pick up the new idioms pretty effortlessly. It's a really unexpected fluency, frankly.