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The Fall Of Perl, The Web's Most Promising Language

68 points by MattRogish 13y ago

nathancahill 13y ago
This could have been titled "The Rise Of Python". Both languages have their uses. I write almost all of my code in Python these days, but fall back to Perl for complicated bash scripting. Shell scripts in Python feel clumsy, while Perl is very well suited for that environment.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  As a Perl programmer whose colleagues occasionally encourage me to switch to Python, can you tell me a little more about what you see to be the uses of each, and why Python feels clumsy for scripting?
  - nathancahill 13y ago
    My bash scripts usually deal with files and text processing. Bash and Perl are great for that, especially Perl when I need a little more structure. Perl is more performant than Python for these tasks. Python is great for other types of scripts though, I usually switch to Python when I need to interact with web services or databases (there are great libraries that make this really easy, Requests and SQLAlchemy). As far as Python feeling clumsy for shell scripts, things like importing basic os functions: import os, sys, shutil and: if __name__ == "__main__": don't make it feel like the best language for the job.
    - Tossrock 13y ago
      If you're not worried about using the script as a module later, you don't technically need the __name__=="__main__" guard.
    - pyre 13y ago
      While I agree that Python seems more clumsy for shell-type scripting, Perl has most of the 'basic' OS functions scattered all over the place, not in a couple of comprehensive libraries. E.g.: File::Basename Cwd <= where abs_path resides, for some reason File::Path <= rmtree, etc File::Spec File::Spec::Functions ... etc ...
- crdoconnor 13y ago
  >Shell scripts in Python feel clumsy Not once you've seen this: http://amoffat.github.io/sh/ http://amoffat.github.io/sh/
  - nathancahill 13y ago
    Oh wow, that's pretty sweet. I'll have to play around with that.
meddlepal 13y ago
Perl missed out on the hype-bubble of the web 2.0 craze which shot Python and Ruby to the top of the charts in the early/mid 2000's. But it wouldn't surprise me if Perl was "rediscovered" at some point sort of like how JavaScript has experienced a renaissance since Node and the much-improved runtime engines showed up. Personally, I have done a little work in Perl, but I never really considered it as tool I would want to build a large app using. I have always argued however that Perl is an ideal replacement for shell scripts and I have wondered for awhile what an interpreter shell would feel like if it used Perl as the language rather than say Bash.
- tudorconstantin 13y ago
  given the relatively small number of new programmers is an actual advantage for us: increased salaries. i don't know the actual reason why, but we have students who, after 3-4 weeks of perl training are thrown in production environment where they fix bugs and implement features on par with our senior devs. It might be because they are very smart, or because the language is actually simpler to learn than it looks at first sight. And the production environment that I'm talking about is a very complex web app from an architectural point of view: it has mysql, memcached, the authorization of documents is done through sphinx search engine, we're using dbix class as an orm and catalyst as a web framework, etc
  - jzawodn 13y ago
    Authorization via sphinx? Interesting! In any case, we use Perl heavily at Craigslist and are helping to sponsor the continued work on Perl6. I don't think it's nearly as bad as people seem to think. But time will tell, of course.
    - tudorconstantin 13y ago
      Yeah, basically there are 100k+ users in DB and 800k+ documents. Each document is filed under one or more geographies and one or more industries. Each user is entitled to access one or more geographies with one or more services. The SQL queries, besides that they have very complex where clauses, are very slow. We use sphinx by indexing those documents, and attaching the geographies and industries as tags to each document. Whenever a user logs in, it takes only a few hundreds of miliseconds to get the latest documents he needs to see
raldi 13y ago
In what possible universe could Perl be considered "straight-jacketed"?
- EdwardDiego 13y ago
  Also, pedant nitpicking: it's straitjacket.
  - zimpenfish 13y ago
    "straightjacket" is also acceptable.
smacktoward 13y ago
> I first heard of Perl when I was in middle school in the early 2000s. Welp, now I officially feel old. Thanks! In seriousness, though, this is not a very informative article. It essentially boils down to "I learned a little Perl after college, but didn't like the syntax. Then I went to grad school and found that everyone there was using Python, so I switched to that instead. Also, where's Perl 6 amirite lol." Which is fine, as far as it goes, but it tells you more about the author's career path than it does about either language. And by doing so, it leaves out important elements of the story. Writing an article about "the fall of Perl" that only incidentally mentions PHP, for instance, is a big omission. Insofar as Perl has fallen, what it fell from is the position of leading language for building Web applications. PHP is what pushed it out of that position, not Python or Ruby. If you want to write an article about the fall of Perl you have to explain how that happened and why, but this article attempts neither. I think the root of the problem is that the author is incorrectly generalizing from his own experiences. He mentions working in scientific computing these days; if you work in that field, and entered the workforce within the last decade, I can totally understand how it might look like The Story Of Programming Languages goes "once there was Perl, now there is Python, The End." But step outside that niche or that time window, and things look very different.
- joe_the_user 13y ago
  I disagree. A long list of the things that replaced Perl in various applications obscures things rather than revealing the basic trend. The overall trend is Perl died everywhere. I personally think Perl's death was proper. During Perl's upswing, it's various absurdities were all touted as virtues. The weird symbols and the ability to do amazing things with a single line were both proof that Perl was the language for the people who knew more than us. At the certain point, the emperor's cloth just faded and people wanted languages to accomplish things rather than to prove they were smart. Perl has positives, Perl's weirdnesses have positives. But once it lost it's cachet, none of the tradeoffs between obscurity and power look good. And yeah, other powerful interpreted languages arose. But which still doesn't matter which one won because once the "magic", the reality distortion field, was gone, every other good interpreted language looked better.
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mempko 13y ago
Still coding perl. I got something against a programming language telling me what to think the way Python does. Python is latin, perl is english.
- D-Coder 13y ago
  This is not a recommendation, then, for either of them. :-)
- gilgoomesh 13y ago
  U understand English? Dude, shit is cray.
  - ChuckMcM 13y ago
    I believe you meant to say 'shit is wack'
erichsu 13y ago
In my opinion, they buried the key point... the dead end of Perl 6. Up until last year, I did a lot of web development in Perl. Its strengths were CPAN & community, ubiquity and top-notch text processing. Its acquired taste was very elegant expressiveness once you grokked the grammar. Then all the Perl leadership focussed on the black hole of Perl 6 which was solving a problem no one had but CS linguists. So Perl users like me felt there was no future in Perl. Perl 6 would have to be relearned for no tangible benefit so why not learn something new with a growing rather than stagnant/declining ecosystem? No one was forced to leave, but like a trap door, as soon as a Perl programmer learned something new, they were only going to continue to decrease their use of Perl. The rise of Python and Ruby (and Ruby on Rails especially) and even PHP, were grave wounds to the health of Perl, but Perl 6 was the self-cutting that bled the community beyond the point of self-repair.
- EdwardDiego 13y ago
  > once you grokked the grammar Perl has a grammar? In seriousness, the old aphorism that "the only thing that can parse Perl is Perl" didn't help Perl. The tooling lags behind that available for other dynamic languages.
  - bjz_ 13y ago
    Perl6 is pretty awesome in that regard. The grammar specification is written in the language itself[0] in a single file using the language's rules[1] feature. Perl6 is an amazing language, but it is hampered by a runtime that is currently too slow, a bad public perception, and a tiny community. [0]: https://github.com/perl6/std/blob/master/STD.pm6 https://github.com/perl6/std/blob/master/STD.pm6 [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_6_rules http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_6_rules
- kamaal 13y ago
  I don't think Perl 6 is a dead end. Far from it. From what I know is that its nearly feature complete. A small set of features remain, but those are only like what should be added for completeness sake. Bulk of the effort is in developing MoarVM, which is likely to become a suitable replacement for Parrot. Documentation, Speed and standard libraries remain as open issues. Of which last I heard was Larry Wall was writing a Camel book equivalent for Perl 6. So its mainly speed and standard libraries. I would give end of next year, by the time its ready for prime time.
greggman 13y ago
I'm by no means a perl expert having only written maybe 10k lines of Perl but ... Perl seemed to me just hack upon hack. You can see the progression. First there were no local variables. Then "local" was added which effectively pushes the current value on the some stack and retrieves that value on the way back, then later "my" was added to actually give local variables. Similarly all the crazy special variables @_,$_, $a, $b, $&, $', $+, @+, @- %-, $^R, $., $/, $|, $\, $", $; etc etc etc. I'm sure someone out there really loves that stuff but to many it's one giant hack, disliked for similar reasons to PHP's disorganization. On top of that it died at version 5 because version 6 never came out. For web stuff, PHP at least provided a huge speed boost (over CGI, the typical way Perl was used) PHP also supported the whole shared host model much better than Perl/CGI. I'm not saying I like PHP. PHP's templating roots also made it more approachable by beginners. I'm only pointing out why for some use cases PHP killed Perl. On the other side Python also killed Perl. Python seems like far less of a hack upon hack design. Python also has a comparable number of libraries, many builtin making it usually as easy to bang something out as Perl was.
- einhverfr 13y ago
  I have written maybe 100-200k lines in Perl. > Similarly all the crazy special variables @_,$_, $a, $b, $&, $', $+, @+, @- %-, $^R, $., $/, $|, $\, $", $; Of these the only four most Perl programmers should ever use are @_, $_, $a, and $b. The rest are great for advanced manipulations (probably along with the local keyword) but are best thought of as configuration tweaks to the runtime. > On top of that it died at version 5 because version 6 never came out. Perl 6 did come out. It just doesn't have that much of a community and has about the same relationship to C++ does to C. Perl 6 won't kill perl 5. Ever. Perl is dead in some environments (and good riddance), but it is a very powerful development environment for others and I doubt it will ever die per se.
pirateking 13y ago
Perl was the first scripting language I really learned when I was an intern at Sun. I read the whole Camel Book my first couple weeks there. I had an awesome sysadmin mentor that was a Perl guru, and when I asked for help he would give me mysterious one-liners that did powerful things, simply saying "use this". I had little idea what I was doing at the time, but it was awesome. I use Ruby now for most scripting, and it is also awesome, but a lot less mysterious.
einhverfr 13y ago
Hmmm... This article strikes me as relatively missing a few things. Perl 5 is a mature language. There is a lot of effort at building Perl 6, but at this point it doesn't really look like Perl 6 will be a successor to Perl 5 (the metaphor now is "little sister"). It's so different, it is like learning a new language. Now, I do a lot of programming in Perl. I have done some scripting in Ruby, Python, PHP, and more, but I always come back to Perl because the language is remarkably flexible. (Rebol is probably the second I frequently come back to, and Red looks promising.) Predicting the demise of Perl is relatively premature. I don't think we will ever see Perl 6 supplant Perl 5. Rather these will become different languages (with a relationship similar to that of C vs C++). Now you can write crap code in any language, and I just love how Python gives invisible characters semantic meaning (not), a problem that is likely to get worse as the number of whitespace characters continues to proliferate (not just plain spaces and tabs, but non-breaking spaces vs regular spaces....). What perl has lost is the "let's quickly throw together an app" crowd. That crowd has gone sometimes to Python, sometimes to Ruby, and sometimes to Lua. From where I stand, good riddance. This is what gave Perl a bad reputation in the past. To plug my own projects, right now I am working on a framework for delegating Perl object methods to PostgreSQL stored procedures.[1] At some point I may port the work to PHP and Python, but currently Perl is where this is really going for me. The thing is that such work is not applicable to the "throw together an app using an ORM or NoSQL fast" crowd, but it allows for some very sophisticated, powerful, and robust business tool development. Additionally I have to plug http://cpantesters.org http://cpantesters.org. This is a really really useful piece of the Perl community. I got a test failure report today for PGObject::Util::DBMethod failing to load in Perl 5.6.4. My first thought was "who the heck uses Perl 5.6 anymore" and my next thought was "I guess I had better start adding minimum Perl versions to my Makefile.PL." [1] The two most important pieces are https://github.com/ledgersmb/PGObject-Simple-Role https://github.com/ledgersmb/PGObject-Simple-Role and https://github.com/ledgersmb/PGObject-Util-DBMethod https://github.com/ledgersmb/PGObject-Util-DBMethod
- pyre 13y ago
  > a problem that is likely to get worse as the number of whitespace characters continues to proliferate (not just plain spaces and tabs, but non-breaking spaces vs regular spaces....). I know that people love to hate on Python's semantic whitespace, but this is the first time that I've seen someone argue that Python's lifespan is limited because we are about to enter a period of exponential growth in the number of whitespace characters. Where do you feel that this growth in the number of whitespace characters is going to come from? Do we not already have a plethora of whitespace characters in the current Unicode standard, in addition to things like the vertical tab of yesteryear that languishes in the ASCII standard? How come we don't see any of these issues now, even with the number of whitespace characters that we already have at our disposal? > The thing is that such work is not applicable to the "throw together an app using an ORM or NoSQL fast" crowd Are you trying to imply that using an ORM is the sign of someone trying to "whip something together fast?" What are your feelings on DBIx::Class? Should those people who use it jump ship to some other language so that you can bid then "good riddance?"
natch 13y ago
>dubbed the Swiss army knife of the Internet "Swiss Army chainsaw" is the correct quote (as can be verified by following the source link provided in the article).
tasty_freeze 13y ago
A few days ago I was at a Half Price Books store. Something which struck me at the moment was that while there were probably 20 Perl books (some of them duplicates), there wasn't a single Python book. I took it as in indication that Perl is in decline and people are unloading their personal perl library and nobody is buying the used ones; meanwhile, people are holding on to their Python books and ones which show up get snapped up. The alternate interpretation is that Perl needs a LOT of books to explain things due to its quirky syntax and myriad coding idioms, so there are simply more Perl books in circulation.
guelo 13y ago
In terms of expressiveness I think Python falls closer to Java than Perl. People make fun of Perl's sigils but I think Python's magic underscores and 'self' everywhere are much uglier in a verbose way. And no one will ever convince me that significant-white-space and not having block enders are good ideas, it makes refactoring and copy-pasting code hazardous. And I don't understand why every language hasn't added Perl's native regex syntactical sugar, it's a huge win for many problems. But yea, Python won.
- thirsteh 13y ago
  To your last point about regexes: I think the general idea is to discourage their use, at least as a default. It is so easy to use them in Perl that they are used way too much, e.g. when you could do a regular (and faster) string search.
  - DougWebb 13y ago
    That's a lousy reason to not include them. Cars are used to much and people really should walk and bike and take the bus more, but we're not about to make cars more difficult to use because of that. Perl's embedding of regexes into the language syntax is a fantastic feature, as is the way captured groups can be assigned to a list. No other language comes close to making regexes usable. Javascript, which at least has a literal syntax for regex, is still awkward. And the other language I use the most, C#, has such a bad interface for getting captures that I get it wrong and have to look up the documentation EVERY SINGLE TIME I USE IT. I would compare regex as an add-on library in most languages to be as awkward as OOP as an add-on to Perl 5 was. At least Perl has corrected that; besides Javascript, have any other languages taken steps to make regexes easier to use?
    - pyre 13y ago
      > At least Perl has corrected that Perl hasn't really corrected that. Moose is an external library (with downsides, such as load-time last I checked). When it becomes part of the core Perl language, I'll consider Perl to have corrected it.
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GFK_of_xmaspast 13y ago
I used perl as my go-to general purpose language for years and years until I joined a python team in 2004, now the only thing I use perl for is as a sed replacement. The perl6 stuff just killed all its momentum dead, and then it seemed to drop off the face of the earth. I don't see it coming back anywhere near what it was fifteen years ago. Too little too late. The only thing I miss about perl is the regexes right there at the heart of things, but I'll trade those for scipy/numpy/cython/etc and come out the better for it.
macleodan 13y ago
It seems the perception of Perl 6 as a long delayed update to Perl 5 is a serious problem for the languages. Perl 6 is not really the next version of Perl 5, it is more like another language. Perl 5 is still under active development. The latest stable release was version 18.2, made in January. Perl 5 will continue to exist even when more people start using Perl 6. Also, Perl 6 is available and usable already.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
When I came out of Google I could see the Python features that endeared it to Googlers (although I expect Go to replace Python pretty much everywhere there eventually). Blekko is a perl shop and it certainly felt a bit strange, but having gotten acclimated I can see the appeal. Every now and then I come across some really idiomatic perl and find it mind bendingly opaque, but for the most part I can code up a quick script in it faster than I ever could in Python. Of course when you write code in a dozen languages you stop seeing the language after a while and just see the code. And at that point it really is all the same.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  > Of course when you write code in a dozen languages you stop seeing the language after a while and just see the code. And at that point it really is all the same. Fully agree. You start to look how language X exposes the CS concept Y, instead of just looking at language X feature list. A kind of meta level, if you will.
pixl97 13y ago
Languages that target and reach large numbers of beginners tend to do well. PHP tends to be the primary example, but BASIC and all forms of it continued by Microsoft are another. When any newb can sit for a few minutes with your language and a HOWTO and make a functioning (web)app it has a chance to be successful. It's hard to target people with a 'harder' syntax even if it may be better for some particular reason. Once a person has learned one language it is more worthwhile to gain a more broad knowledge base in that one rather then invest time learning in another. It's likely most people that learned perl didn't start with perl as their first language. At the time it what came with whatever form of unix they had and extended the scripting they did, but was not friendly. There was just a lack of alternatives at the time. Now, in an interconnected world with no shortage of better alternatives, there is simply little reason to invest any time in learning Perl.
rasz_pl 13y ago
Perl - the ultimate job security tool. When I come upon a Perl program that does 80% of what I need, and would do 100% when modified, I simply turn around and look again. I consider reading other peoples Perl code on the same level as firing up Hexrays to debug closed source Mips programs.
agumonkey 13y ago
I only had a shallow knowledge of perl, then I read this http://matt.might.net/articles/perl-by-example/ http://matt.might.net/articles/perl-by-example/ . As much as I like linguistics, perl sometimes feels a little too creative :)
- qohen 13y ago
  FYI, that article got criticized on HN pretty heavily not ago for not doing things in the 'modern Perl' style: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7220167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7220167
  - agumonkey 13y ago
    Thanks, I assumed good authority from the author since he's into Programming Languages research. Heading to your link now.
metsgrets 13y ago
I'm going to take a moment to vent about Perl. My company was experimenting with it as an alternative to Ruby based on the enormity of available CPAN modules. 1. CPAN is awful. The website itself is so bad that the "correct" way to browse it is to use the big brother "Metacpan". Metacpan is also very bad, they strayed too close to CPAN design. Navigating it is a pain, and most of the documentation is done very poorly because no one puts time into formatting their readmes. None of the modules are in github, the issue tracker is a nightmare, the links make no sense ( "Source (raw) Browse (raw)" ) - the website itself is poorly done. 2. CPAN has many modules, which sounds like a selling point. The truth is that many of the modules we have worked with have bugs and poor documentation, and almost all of them are unmaintained. The owners either gave up or actually died (this is an old language after all). There is absolutely no support for trying to do common tasks with CPAN modules. You can't Google for your error, you won't get a response on StackOverflow. Bug reports don't get answered because the ecosystem is a ghost town. This makes trying to do common tasks painful. 3. CPAN is just messy all around. There's not even a command line flag to find out what version of a module you have installed. You have to hack into its internals to figure out what versions you're running. Some modules are hosted in foreign countries that intermittently decide not to download. Builds have broken due to inability to download from a mirror. A "benefit" of CPAN is that modules are tested against multiple architectures for you. The reality is that these tests don't matter. The Perl developers I've worked with bypass the tests with CPAN by installing with --notest because it's faster, and more than once a module has failed to install because the tests failed. But the failure was either a false positive or had no noticeable impact on implementation, and there's no alternative and no one to respond to bug reports. The only known benefit of CPAN - automated test running, has never once proved helpful. 4. One point I like in this article is that Python makes the right thing obvious. Perl's "multiple ways to do things" is one of its bigger design flaws. It seems like Larry Wall (creator of Perl) has a no-one-likes-this-langauge-so-try-to-please-everyone-by-offering-every-way-to-do-it complex. It's all to the detriment of the language. I have to Google for how to iterate over a hash every time, because there's multiple ways to do it, and they all suck. I never know if iterating over a $hash is the same as iterating over a %hash or a \%hash. Or if I should be searching for "hash" or "hashref" or if I should be using a "list" or an "array" or a scalar or who cares. The multiple ways to do things only amounts to one asshole on the team will exploit some unknown feature of map to write shorter code, not document it, and no one can read it. Any efficiency gained from shorter code is lost to unmaintainability. Also, Perl is not efficient, so it doesn't matter. 5. The language itself is gross. Beauty is subjective, readable code is not. The prefixing of variable names with @, % et all makes dissecting code hard and Googling impossible. The tacking-on of modern functionality will slap you in the face repeatedly. See: references. References are one of, if not the, biggest design flaw in Perl. They were introduced as a tack-on to hack over it's shitty default data structures. They make reading and writing code confusing, overly complicated, and haven not once offered us any benefit. Perl's leaky abstraction over poorly implemented data structures is easily seen in references. 6. No really, the language is gross. It has magic built in, and the syntax is a nightmare. Everything is done with sigils (characters like ~!=@#$ etc). You get function arguments as @_ . You do a regex match with $string =~ /(capture)/. This will magically populate $1 through $n with capture groups. This is bad. To substitute a string, you do $string =~ s/a/b. This modifies the string in place. Try to Google for how to not modify the string in place. Seriously, try and Google for it. If you forget to include an even number of values in a list it becomes another data structure entirely. If you don't put a '1;' at the end of your module code it will fail to work (no, really). 7. Larry's personal beliefs stray into Perl too much. Larry is a well known Christian, and you must "bless" a reference, a keyword baked into the language. This creeps me out. It doesn't really matter, and I 100% acknowledge how judgmental I'm being, but it still is out of place in a programming language. 8. All of these reasons culminate to one point I just realized: Perl is a bad language for a team. It might be fine for one person to write code that will never have to be maintained or read to accomplish some dirty task. The "features" of Perl ruin it for a team environment. Feautres like its "flexibility", wheel reinventing to avoid buggy CPAN modules, unreadable features hidden in sigils, magic, poor documentation, and hacker culture make it a very poor choice for multiple people to work on the same thing. This is the perspective of a relative newcomer (~3 months of Perl exploration). I'm not a Python advocate and I don't have a strong opinion of what other language you should use, but Perl has caused us many problems and we switched to Ruby early on because of them. Maybe if / when I learn more about it I'll have a different opinion of it. Right now though I agree with this article and seeing Perl go out the door is fine with me.
lelf 13y ago
This article is full of rubbish. Like this: 2000 Python 2.0 released 1994 Perl 5 released 2008 Python 3.0 released 2000 – present[/b] Perl 6 "in development" It's more like 2013 — Perl 5.18 released Perl 6 is entirely different language (with unfortunate name). And honestly, as a language it's light years ahead of python.
- fearface 13y ago
  Sometimes being light years ahead and being completely out of touch are interchangeable statements.
  - lelf 13y ago
    Not in this case. Just unpopular. Perl6 is probably one of the most practical and modern(ish) languages out there.
- abraham_s 13y ago
  I liked writing Perl instead of bash but I couldn't shake the "whole thing is a hack" feeling. That why I found myself using more and more Python. Is Perl 6 is more consistent(for lack of a better word) language ?
  - kamaal 13y ago
    >>Is Perl 6 is more consistent(for lack of a better word) language ? Not the right way of looking at it. Perl 6 doesn't continue from Perl 5. Its more like a total redesign. Some even say, they are so different Perl 6 isn't even Perl(5) anymore- only common things being sigils, core philosophy and the author. I can't obviously write a complete synopsis of Perl 6 in a comment. But its like what Perl 5 would look after 20-30 years in development + Lisp powers in C syntax.
lazyloop 13y ago
Contrary to popular belief Perl is still very much alive and healthy. Sure, it has baggage, but so does any language that kept evolving for decades. If you want to know what Perl really looks like these days take a look at the Modern Perl book (http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl/ http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl/) and Mojolicious web framework. (http://mojolicio.us http://mojolicio.us)
gregjor 13y ago
I understand that this is written from an academic point of view and focuses on scientific computing, but writing "upstart PHP grew in size to the point where it is now arguably the most common language for web development" is a serious understatement. PHP dates back to 1994, and (arguably) became a serious contender with the release of PHP 3 in 1998. PHP pushed out the then-dominant web programming languages ASP (a Visual Basic variant) and ColdFusion, along with Perl. At that time Python and Ruby were not on the web development radar. PHP is not "arguably the most common language for web development": it's by far the most common. Much of that is due to WordPress, Drupal, and other PHP-based CMSs, but unlike Ruby and Rails, PHP had a large developer base before WordPress and Drupal. The article also completely ignores JavaScript, which thanks to node.js is gaining web developer mindshare faster than either Python or Ruby, and may push PHP's share down. [PHP also uses the hated $ to prefix variable names, but that hasn't slowed it down. PHP is not as pretty as Python or Ruby but it's a lot easier to read than Perl.]
- cafard 13y ago
  "PHP is not as pretty as Python or Ruby but it's a lot easier to read than Perl." Good Perl is quite readable, and bad PHP, well, you are a fortunate man if you have never encountered any, and a top-notch reader if you have and have found it easy to follow.
kamaal 13y ago
I'm not sure why every Python lover has to be Perl troll. No seriously. The author is clearly a Python fan boy, and he can very well write a good technical article to illustrate Python's goodness. I'm sure we all can appreciate that. But you don't have to troll Perl endlessly to do that. Besides all that, I've been hearing this Perl is dead thing since what, 10 years? If that was really the case Perl should not only have died, but should have even been forgotten from our very memories. Something tells me most Python lovers take Perl as a very serious competitor. Else they wouldn't be writing articles like these. Python's big rise came after hipster crowds got web frameworks written in Python. If you use hibernate or spring in Java, you can only come to love Python's web frameworks. But that time is long gone now. The crowd went to newer languages like Scala and Go. For all practical popularity purposes. Perl and Python are the very same these days. If you are really worried about popularity. Lets talk of Python's falling popularity compared to languages like Go and Scala. >>By the late 2000s Python was not only the dominant alternative to Perl for many text parsing tasks typically associated with Perl When it comes to serious text parsing work, Perl is still the only practical alternative you have. Ever checked upon Perl's Unicode capabilities? >>2000 – present[/b] Perl 6 "in development" The development of Perl 6 didn't start in 2000. And Perl 6 and Python aren't even in the same league for comparison. However the author completely misses the point. I can sit on top of a high priority production issue, just have a big log file. If all I have is that- Perl has the tools to help me get my job done in a couple of hours. Call me back, when Python can help me do that. >>Perl 6 has been an ongoing development since 2000. Yet after 14 years it is not officially done, making it the equivalent of Chinese Democracy for Guns N’ Roses Comparing Perl 6 and Python's progress is a bit ridiculous. Merely the ambition and audacity of what Perl 6 is aiming to achieve is what Python would like to in the next 20-30 years of iterative development. Perl 6 is not your usual language which aims a different syntactical style for decision and iterative statements and then calls it progress. A simple tour of the Perl 6 spec can help you on that.
signal9 13y ago
My me-too post. I was a web developer working nearly exclusively in Perl during the time period the author describes. I understand the author's lack of a handle on the period as he was, as he describes, in middle school at the time. Me, I had a job and a family and I was an actual Perl programmer. Come at me bro. That aside, the description of a transition of developers from Perl to Python just didn't happen the way it is described in the article. Or, to be fair, it didn't happen that way for me. I worked on a team extracting data from a number of disparate data sources and presenting reports on the web - basically the idiomatic Perl task. We tried to bring in PHP for a bit but found it wanting. As our jobs evolved out from under us, each of us moved on from Perl. Reporting jobs were becoming largely obsolete and there was market demand for working in other languages elsewhere. Being the early oughts, most of the engineers I knew had at least a few languages in their repertoire. Of the developers I worked with, I was the only one to pick up Python. I remember feeling like I wanted to work with a dynamic language where OO was more core to the language feature set. Ruby and Python were both viable, though less known, options. I don't remember why I chose Python over Ruby, but I did. My colleagues went on to work in Java or C#. Over time, I did a bit of both as well, especially C#. One buddy of mine still does his personal and peripheral scripting in Perl. I've largely forgotten the language. Back on topic, I simply did not see an exodus of developers from Perl to Python. It just didn't happen that way within my community. Jobs got phased out, new ones began, often with new tools. Off topic, what I did see at the time was a large movement of COBOL developers to JAVA. I saw that as a genuine migration, in earnest, of developers who were facing obsolescence.

68 points by MattRogish 13y ago

This could have been titled "The Rise Of Python". Both languages have their uses. I write almost all of my code in Python these days, but fall back to Perl for complicated bash scripting. Shell scripts in Python feel clumsy, while Perl is very well suited for that environment.

sliverstorm 13y ago
As a Perl programmer whose colleagues occasionally encourage me to switch to Python, can you tell me a little more about what you see to be the uses of each, and why Python feels clumsy for scripting?
- nathancahill 13y ago
  My bash scripts usually deal with files and text processing. Bash and Perl are great for that, especially Perl when I need a little more structure. Perl is more performant than Python for these tasks. Python is great for other types of scripts though, I usually switch to Python when I need to interact with web services or databases (there are great libraries that make this really easy, Requests and SQLAlchemy). As far as Python feeling clumsy for shell scripts, things like importing basic os functions: import os, sys, shutil and: if __name__ == "__main__": don't make it feel like the best language for the job.
  - Tossrock 13y ago
    If you're not worried about using the script as a module later, you don't technically need the __name__=="__main__" guard.
  - pyre 13y ago
    While I agree that Python seems more clumsy for shell-type scripting, Perl has most of the 'basic' OS functions scattered all over the place, not in a couple of comprehensive libraries. E.g.: File::Basename Cwd <= where abs_path resides, for some reason File::Path <= rmtree, etc File::Spec File::Spec::Functions ... etc ...
crdoconnor 13y ago
>Shell scripts in Python feel clumsy Not once you've seen this: http://amoffat.github.io/sh/ http://amoffat.github.io/sh/
- nathancahill 13y ago
  Oh wow, that's pretty sweet. I'll have to play around with that.

meddlepal 13y ago

Perl missed out on the hype-bubble of the web 2.0 craze which shot Python and Ruby to the top of the charts in the early/mid 2000's. But it wouldn't surprise me if Perl was "rediscovered" at some point sort of like how JavaScript has experienced a renaissance since Node and the much-improved runtime engines showed up. Personally, I have done a little work in Perl, but I never really considered it as tool I would want to build a large app using. I have always argued however that Perl is an ideal replacement for shell scripts and I have wondered for awhile what an interpreter shell would feel like if it used Perl as the language rather than say Bash.

tudorconstantin 13y ago
given the relatively small number of new programmers is an actual advantage for us: increased salaries. i don't know the actual reason why, but we have students who, after 3-4 weeks of perl training are thrown in production environment where they fix bugs and implement features on par with our senior devs. It might be because they are very smart, or because the language is actually simpler to learn than it looks at first sight. And the production environment that I'm talking about is a very complex web app from an architectural point of view: it has mysql, memcached, the authorization of documents is done through sphinx search engine, we're using dbix class as an orm and catalyst as a web framework, etc
- jzawodn 13y ago
  Authorization via sphinx? Interesting! In any case, we use Perl heavily at Craigslist and are helping to sponsor the continued work on Perl6. I don't think it's nearly as bad as people seem to think. But time will tell, of course.
  - tudorconstantin 13y ago
    Yeah, basically there are 100k+ users in DB and 800k+ documents. Each document is filed under one or more geographies and one or more industries. Each user is entitled to access one or more geographies with one or more services. The SQL queries, besides that they have very complex where clauses, are very slow. We use sphinx by indexing those documents, and attaching the geographies and industries as tags to each document. Whenever a user logs in, it takes only a few hundreds of miliseconds to get the latest documents he needs to see

raldi 13y ago

In what possible universe could Perl be considered "straight-jacketed"?

EdwardDiego 13y ago
Also, pedant nitpicking: it's straitjacket.
- zimpenfish 13y ago
  "straightjacket" is also acceptable.

smacktoward 13y ago

> I first heard of Perl when I was in middle school in the early 2000s. Welp, now I officially feel old. Thanks! In seriousness, though, this is not a very informative article. It essentially boils down to "I learned a little Perl after college, but didn't like the syntax. Then I went to grad school and found that everyone there was using Python, so I switched to that instead. Also, where's Perl 6 amirite lol." Which is fine, as far as it goes, but it tells you more about the author's career path than it does about either language. And by doing so, it leaves out important elements of the story. Writing an article about "the fall of Perl" that only incidentally mentions PHP, for instance, is a big omission. Insofar as Perl has fallen, what it fell from is the position of leading language for building Web applications. PHP is what pushed it out of that position, not Python or Ruby. If you want to write an article about the fall of Perl you have to explain how that happened and why, but this article attempts neither. I think the root of the problem is that the author is incorrectly generalizing from his own experiences. He mentions working in scientific computing these days; if you work in that field, and entered the workforce within the last decade, I can totally understand how it might look like The Story Of Programming Languages goes "once there was Perl, now there is Python, The End." But step outside that niche or that time window, and things look very different.

joe_the_user 13y ago
I disagree. A long list of the things that replaced Perl in various applications obscures things rather than revealing the basic trend. The overall trend is Perl died everywhere. I personally think Perl's death was proper. During Perl's upswing, it's various absurdities were all touted as virtues. The weird symbols and the ability to do amazing things with a single line were both proof that Perl was the language for the people who knew more than us. At the certain point, the emperor's cloth just faded and people wanted languages to accomplish things rather than to prove they were smart. Perl has positives, Perl's weirdnesses have positives. But once it lost it's cachet, none of the tradeoffs between obscurity and power look good. And yeah, other powerful interpreted languages arose. But which still doesn't matter which one won because once the "magic", the reality distortion field, was gone, every other good interpreted language looked better.
- 13y ago

mempko 13y ago

Still coding perl. I got something against a programming language telling me what to think the way Python does. Python is latin, perl is english.

D-Coder 13y ago
This is not a recommendation, then, for either of them. :-)
gilgoomesh 13y ago
U understand English? Dude, shit is cray.
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  I believe you meant to say 'shit is wack'

erichsu 13y ago

In my opinion, they buried the key point... the dead end of Perl 6. Up until last year, I did a lot of web development in Perl. Its strengths were CPAN & community, ubiquity and top-notch text processing. Its acquired taste was very elegant expressiveness once you grokked the grammar. Then all the Perl leadership focussed on the black hole of Perl 6 which was solving a problem no one had but CS linguists. So Perl users like me felt there was no future in Perl. Perl 6 would have to be relearned for no tangible benefit so why not learn something new with a growing rather than stagnant/declining ecosystem? No one was forced to leave, but like a trap door, as soon as a Perl programmer learned something new, they were only going to continue to decrease their use of Perl. The rise of Python and Ruby (and Ruby on Rails especially) and even PHP, were grave wounds to the health of Perl, but Perl 6 was the self-cutting that bled the community beyond the point of self-repair.

EdwardDiego 13y ago
> once you grokked the grammar Perl has a grammar? In seriousness, the old aphorism that "the only thing that can parse Perl is Perl" didn't help Perl. The tooling lags behind that available for other dynamic languages.
- bjz_ 13y ago
  Perl6 is pretty awesome in that regard. The grammar specification is written in the language itself[0] in a single file using the language's rules[1] feature. Perl6 is an amazing language, but it is hampered by a runtime that is currently too slow, a bad public perception, and a tiny community. [0]: https://github.com/perl6/std/blob/master/STD.pm6 https://github.com/perl6/std/blob/master/STD.pm6 [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_6_rules http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_6_rules
kamaal 13y ago
I don't think Perl 6 is a dead end. Far from it. From what I know is that its nearly feature complete. A small set of features remain, but those are only like what should be added for completeness sake. Bulk of the effort is in developing MoarVM, which is likely to become a suitable replacement for Parrot. Documentation, Speed and standard libraries remain as open issues. Of which last I heard was Larry Wall was writing a Camel book equivalent for Perl 6. So its mainly speed and standard libraries. I would give end of next year, by the time its ready for prime time.

greggman 13y ago

I'm by no means a perl expert having only written maybe 10k lines of Perl but ... Perl seemed to me just hack upon hack. You can see the progression. First there were no local variables. Then "local" was added which effectively pushes the current value on the some stack and retrieves that value on the way back, then later "my" was added to actually give local variables. Similarly all the crazy special variables @_,$_, $a, $b, $&, $', $+, @+, @- %-, $^R, $., $/, $|, $\, $", $; etc etc etc. I'm sure someone out there really loves that stuff but to many it's one giant hack, disliked for similar reasons to PHP's disorganization. On top of that it died at version 5 because version 6 never came out. For web stuff, PHP at least provided a huge speed boost (over CGI, the typical way Perl was used) PHP also supported the whole shared host model much better than Perl/CGI. I'm not saying I like PHP. PHP's templating roots also made it more approachable by beginners. I'm only pointing out why for some use cases PHP killed Perl. On the other side Python also killed Perl. Python seems like far less of a hack upon hack design. Python also has a comparable number of libraries, many builtin making it usually as easy to bang something out as Perl was.

einhverfr 13y ago
I have written maybe 100-200k lines in Perl. > Similarly all the crazy special variables @_,$_, $a, $b, $&, $', $+, @+, @- %-, $^R, $., $/, $|, $\, $", $; Of these the only four most Perl programmers should ever use are @_, $_, $a, and $b. The rest are great for advanced manipulations (probably along with the local keyword) but are best thought of as configuration tweaks to the runtime. > On top of that it died at version 5 because version 6 never came out. Perl 6 did come out. It just doesn't have that much of a community and has about the same relationship to C++ does to C. Perl 6 won't kill perl 5. Ever. Perl is dead in some environments (and good riddance), but it is a very powerful development environment for others and I doubt it will ever die per se.

pirateking 13y ago

Perl was the first scripting language I really learned when I was an intern at Sun. I read the whole Camel Book my first couple weeks there. I had an awesome sysadmin mentor that was a Perl guru, and when I asked for help he would give me mysterious one-liners that did powerful things, simply saying "use this". I had little idea what I was doing at the time, but it was awesome. I use Ruby now for most scripting, and it is also awesome, but a lot less mysterious.

einhverfr 13y ago

Hmmm... This article strikes me as relatively missing a few things. Perl 5 is a mature language. There is a lot of effort at building Perl 6, but at this point it doesn't really look like Perl 6 will be a successor to Perl 5 (the metaphor now is "little sister"). It's so different, it is like learning a new language. Now, I do a lot of programming in Perl. I have done some scripting in Ruby, Python, PHP, and more, but I always come back to Perl because the language is remarkably flexible. (Rebol is probably the second I frequently come back to, and Red looks promising.) Predicting the demise of Perl is relatively premature. I don't think we will ever see Perl 6 supplant Perl 5. Rather these will become different languages (with a relationship similar to that of C vs C++). Now you can write crap code in any language, and I just love how Python gives invisible characters semantic meaning (not), a problem that is likely to get worse as the number of whitespace characters continues to proliferate (not just plain spaces and tabs, but non-breaking spaces vs regular spaces....). What perl has lost is the "let's quickly throw together an app" crowd. That crowd has gone sometimes to Python, sometimes to Ruby, and sometimes to Lua. From where I stand, good riddance. This is what gave Perl a bad reputation in the past. To plug my own projects, right now I am working on a framework for delegating Perl object methods to PostgreSQL stored procedures.[1] At some point I may port the work to PHP and Python, but currently Perl is where this is really going for me. The thing is that such work is not applicable to the "throw together an app using an ORM or NoSQL fast" crowd, but it allows for some very sophisticated, powerful, and robust business tool development. Additionally I have to plug http://cpantesters.org http://cpantesters.org. This is a really really useful piece of the Perl community. I got a test failure report today for PGObject::Util::DBMethod failing to load in Perl 5.6.4. My first thought was "who the heck uses Perl 5.6 anymore" and my next thought was "I guess I had better start adding minimum Perl versions to my Makefile.PL." [1] The two most important pieces are https://github.com/ledgersmb/PGObject-Simple-Role https://github.com/ledgersmb/PGObject-Simple-Role and https://github.com/ledgersmb/PGObject-Util-DBMethod https://github.com/ledgersmb/PGObject-Util-DBMethod

pyre 13y ago
> a problem that is likely to get worse as the number of whitespace characters continues to proliferate (not just plain spaces and tabs, but non-breaking spaces vs regular spaces....). I know that people love to hate on Python's semantic whitespace, but this is the first time that I've seen someone argue that Python's lifespan is limited because we are about to enter a period of exponential growth in the number of whitespace characters. Where do you feel that this growth in the number of whitespace characters is going to come from? Do we not already have a plethora of whitespace characters in the current Unicode standard, in addition to things like the vertical tab of yesteryear that languishes in the ASCII standard? How come we don't see any of these issues now, even with the number of whitespace characters that we already have at our disposal? > The thing is that such work is not applicable to the "throw together an app using an ORM or NoSQL fast" crowd Are you trying to imply that using an ORM is the sign of someone trying to "whip something together fast?" What are your feelings on DBIx::Class? Should those people who use it jump ship to some other language so that you can bid then "good riddance?"

natch 13y ago

>dubbed the Swiss army knife of the Internet "Swiss Army chainsaw" is the correct quote (as can be verified by following the source link provided in the article).

tasty_freeze 13y ago

A few days ago I was at a Half Price Books store. Something which struck me at the moment was that while there were probably 20 Perl books (some of them duplicates), there wasn't a single Python book. I took it as in indication that Perl is in decline and people are unloading their personal perl library and nobody is buying the used ones; meanwhile, people are holding on to their Python books and ones which show up get snapped up. The alternate interpretation is that Perl needs a LOT of books to explain things due to its quirky syntax and myriad coding idioms, so there are simply more Perl books in circulation.

guelo 13y ago

In terms of expressiveness I think Python falls closer to Java than Perl. People make fun of Perl's sigils but I think Python's magic underscores and 'self' everywhere are much uglier in a verbose way. And no one will ever convince me that significant-white-space and not having block enders are good ideas, it makes refactoring and copy-pasting code hazardous. And I don't understand why every language hasn't added Perl's native regex syntactical sugar, it's a huge win for many problems. But yea, Python won.

thirsteh 13y ago
To your last point about regexes: I think the general idea is to discourage their use, at least as a default. It is so easy to use them in Perl that they are used way too much, e.g. when you could do a regular (and faster) string search.
- DougWebb 13y ago
  That's a lousy reason to not include them. Cars are used to much and people really should walk and bike and take the bus more, but we're not about to make cars more difficult to use because of that. Perl's embedding of regexes into the language syntax is a fantastic feature, as is the way captured groups can be assigned to a list. No other language comes close to making regexes usable. Javascript, which at least has a literal syntax for regex, is still awkward. And the other language I use the most, C#, has such a bad interface for getting captures that I get it wrong and have to look up the documentation EVERY SINGLE TIME I USE IT. I would compare regex as an add-on library in most languages to be as awkward as OOP as an add-on to Perl 5 was. At least Perl has corrected that; besides Javascript, have any other languages taken steps to make regexes easier to use?
  - pyre 13y ago
    > At least Perl has corrected that Perl hasn't really corrected that. Moose is an external library (with downsides, such as load-time last I checked). When it becomes part of the core Perl language, I'll consider Perl to have corrected it.
- 13y ago

GFK_of_xmaspast 13y ago

I used perl as my go-to general purpose language for years and years until I joined a python team in 2004, now the only thing I use perl for is as a sed replacement. The perl6 stuff just killed all its momentum dead, and then it seemed to drop off the face of the earth. I don't see it coming back anywhere near what it was fifteen years ago. Too little too late. The only thing I miss about perl is the regexes right there at the heart of things, but I'll trade those for scipy/numpy/cython/etc and come out the better for it.

macleodan 13y ago

It seems the perception of Perl 6 as a long delayed update to Perl 5 is a serious problem for the languages. Perl 6 is not really the next version of Perl 5, it is more like another language. Perl 5 is still under active development. The latest stable release was version 18.2, made in January. Perl 5 will continue to exist even when more people start using Perl 6. Also, Perl 6 is available and usable already.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

When I came out of Google I could see the Python features that endeared it to Googlers (although I expect Go to replace Python pretty much everywhere there eventually). Blekko is a perl shop and it certainly felt a bit strange, but having gotten acclimated I can see the appeal. Every now and then I come across some really idiomatic perl and find it mind bendingly opaque, but for the most part I can code up a quick script in it faster than I ever could in Python. Of course when you write code in a dozen languages you stop seeing the language after a while and just see the code. And at that point it really is all the same.

pjmlp 13y ago
> Of course when you write code in a dozen languages you stop seeing the language after a while and just see the code. And at that point it really is all the same. Fully agree. You start to look how language X exposes the CS concept Y, instead of just looking at language X feature list. A kind of meta level, if you will.

pixl97 13y ago

Languages that target and reach large numbers of beginners tend to do well. PHP tends to be the primary example, but BASIC and all forms of it continued by Microsoft are another. When any newb can sit for a few minutes with your language and a HOWTO and make a functioning (web)app it has a chance to be successful. It's hard to target people with a 'harder' syntax even if it may be better for some particular reason. Once a person has learned one language it is more worthwhile to gain a more broad knowledge base in that one rather then invest time learning in another. It's likely most people that learned perl didn't start with perl as their first language. At the time it what came with whatever form of unix they had and extended the scripting they did, but was not friendly. There was just a lack of alternatives at the time. Now, in an interconnected world with no shortage of better alternatives, there is simply little reason to invest any time in learning Perl.

rasz_pl 13y ago

Perl - the ultimate job security tool. When I come upon a Perl program that does 80% of what I need, and would do 100% when modified, I simply turn around and look again. I consider reading other peoples Perl code on the same level as firing up Hexrays to debug closed source Mips programs.

agumonkey 13y ago

I only had a shallow knowledge of perl, then I read this http://matt.might.net/articles/perl-by-example/ http://matt.might.net/articles/perl-by-example/ . As much as I like linguistics, perl sometimes feels a little too creative :)

qohen 13y ago
FYI, that article got criticized on HN pretty heavily not ago for not doing things in the 'modern Perl' style: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7220167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7220167
- agumonkey 13y ago
  Thanks, I assumed good authority from the author since he's into Programming Languages research. Heading to your link now.

metsgrets 13y ago

I'm going to take a moment to vent about Perl. My company was experimenting with it as an alternative to Ruby based on the enormity of available CPAN modules. 1. CPAN is awful. The website itself is so bad that the "correct" way to browse it is to use the big brother "Metacpan". Metacpan is also very bad, they strayed too close to CPAN design. Navigating it is a pain, and most of the documentation is done very poorly because no one puts time into formatting their readmes. None of the modules are in github, the issue tracker is a nightmare, the links make no sense ( "Source (raw) Browse (raw)" ) - the website itself is poorly done. 2. CPAN has many modules, which sounds like a selling point. The truth is that many of the modules we have worked with have bugs and poor documentation, and almost all of them are unmaintained. The owners either gave up or actually died (this is an old language after all). There is absolutely no support for trying to do common tasks with CPAN modules. You can't Google for your error, you won't get a response on StackOverflow. Bug reports don't get answered because the ecosystem is a ghost town. This makes trying to do common tasks painful. 3. CPAN is just messy all around. There's not even a command line flag to find out what version of a module you have installed. You have to hack into its internals to figure out what versions you're running. Some modules are hosted in foreign countries that intermittently decide not to download. Builds have broken due to inability to download from a mirror. A "benefit" of CPAN is that modules are tested against multiple architectures for you. The reality is that these tests don't matter. The Perl developers I've worked with bypass the tests with CPAN by installing with --notest because it's faster, and more than once a module has failed to install because the tests failed. But the failure was either a false positive or had no noticeable impact on implementation, and there's no alternative and no one to respond to bug reports. The only known benefit of CPAN - automated test running, has never once proved helpful. 4. One point I like in this article is that Python makes the right thing obvious. Perl's "multiple ways to do things" is one of its bigger design flaws. It seems like Larry Wall (creator of Perl) has a no-one-likes-this-langauge-so-try-to-please-everyone-by-offering-every-way-to-do-it complex. It's all to the detriment of the language. I have to Google for how to iterate over a hash every time, because there's multiple ways to do it, and they all suck. I never know if iterating over a $hash is the same as iterating over a %hash or a \%hash. Or if I should be searching for "hash" or "hashref" or if I should be using a "list" or an "array" or a scalar or who cares. The multiple ways to do things only amounts to one asshole on the team will exploit some unknown feature of map to write shorter code, not document it, and no one can read it. Any efficiency gained from shorter code is lost to unmaintainability. Also, Perl is not efficient, so it doesn't matter. 5. The language itself is gross. Beauty is subjective, readable code is not. The prefixing of variable names with @, % et all makes dissecting code hard and Googling impossible. The tacking-on of modern functionality will slap you in the face repeatedly. See: references. References are one of, if not the, biggest design flaw in Perl. They were introduced as a tack-on to hack over it's shitty default data structures. They make reading and writing code confusing, overly complicated, and haven not once offered us any benefit. Perl's leaky abstraction over poorly implemented data structures is easily seen in references. 6. No really, the language is gross. It has magic built in, and the syntax is a nightmare. Everything is done with sigils (characters like ~!=@#$ etc). You get function arguments as @_ . You do a regex match with $string =~ /(capture)/. This will magically populate $1 through $n with capture groups. This is bad. To substitute a string, you do $string =~ s/a/b. This modifies the string in place. Try to Google for how to not modify the string in place. Seriously, try and Google for it. If you forget to include an even number of values in a list it becomes another data structure entirely. If you don't put a '1;' at the end of your module code it will fail to work (no, really). 7. Larry's personal beliefs stray into Perl too much. Larry is a well known Christian, and you must "bless" a reference, a keyword baked into the language. This creeps me out. It doesn't really matter, and I 100% acknowledge how judgmental I'm being, but it still is out of place in a programming language. 8. All of these reasons culminate to one point I just realized: Perl is a bad language for a team. It might be fine for one person to write code that will never have to be maintained or read to accomplish some dirty task. The "features" of Perl ruin it for a team environment. Feautres like its "flexibility", wheel reinventing to avoid buggy CPAN modules, unreadable features hidden in sigils, magic, poor documentation, and hacker culture make it a very poor choice for multiple people to work on the same thing. This is the perspective of a relative newcomer (~3 months of Perl exploration). I'm not a Python advocate and I don't have a strong opinion of what other language you should use, but Perl has caused us many problems and we switched to Ruby early on because of them. Maybe if / when I learn more about it I'll have a different opinion of it. Right now though I agree with this article and seeing Perl go out the door is fine with me.

lelf 13y ago

This article is full of rubbish. Like this: 2000 Python 2.0 released 1994 Perl 5 released 2008 Python 3.0 released 2000 – present[/b] Perl 6 "in development" It's more like 2013 — Perl 5.18 released Perl 6 is entirely different language (with unfortunate name). And honestly, as a language it's light years ahead of python.

fearface 13y ago
Sometimes being light years ahead and being completely out of touch are interchangeable statements.
- lelf 13y ago
  Not in this case. Just unpopular. Perl6 is probably one of the most practical and modern(ish) languages out there.
abraham_s 13y ago
I liked writing Perl instead of bash but I couldn't shake the "whole thing is a hack" feeling. That why I found myself using more and more Python. Is Perl 6 is more consistent(for lack of a better word) language ?
- kamaal 13y ago
  >>Is Perl 6 is more consistent(for lack of a better word) language ? Not the right way of looking at it. Perl 6 doesn't continue from Perl 5. Its more like a total redesign. Some even say, they are so different Perl 6 isn't even Perl(5) anymore- only common things being sigils, core philosophy and the author. I can't obviously write a complete synopsis of Perl 6 in a comment. But its like what Perl 5 would look after 20-30 years in development + Lisp powers in C syntax.

lazyloop 13y ago

Contrary to popular belief Perl is still very much alive and healthy. Sure, it has baggage, but so does any language that kept evolving for decades. If you want to know what Perl really looks like these days take a look at the Modern Perl book (http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl/ http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl/) and Mojolicious web framework. (http://mojolicio.us http://mojolicio.us)

gregjor 13y ago

I understand that this is written from an academic point of view and focuses on scientific computing, but writing "upstart PHP grew in size to the point where it is now arguably the most common language for web development" is a serious understatement. PHP dates back to 1994, and (arguably) became a serious contender with the release of PHP 3 in 1998. PHP pushed out the then-dominant web programming languages ASP (a Visual Basic variant) and ColdFusion, along with Perl. At that time Python and Ruby were not on the web development radar. PHP is not "arguably the most common language for web development": it's by far the most common. Much of that is due to WordPress, Drupal, and other PHP-based CMSs, but unlike Ruby and Rails, PHP had a large developer base before WordPress and Drupal. The article also completely ignores JavaScript, which thanks to node.js is gaining web developer mindshare faster than either Python or Ruby, and may push PHP's share down. [PHP also uses the hated $ to prefix variable names, but that hasn't slowed it down. PHP is not as pretty as Python or Ruby but it's a lot easier to read than Perl.]

cafard 13y ago
"PHP is not as pretty as Python or Ruby but it's a lot easier to read than Perl." Good Perl is quite readable, and bad PHP, well, you are a fortunate man if you have never encountered any, and a top-notch reader if you have and have found it easy to follow.

kamaal 13y ago

I'm not sure why every Python lover has to be Perl troll. No seriously. The author is clearly a Python fan boy, and he can very well write a good technical article to illustrate Python's goodness. I'm sure we all can appreciate that. But you don't have to troll Perl endlessly to do that. Besides all that, I've been hearing this Perl is dead thing since what, 10 years? If that was really the case Perl should not only have died, but should have even been forgotten from our very memories. Something tells me most Python lovers take Perl as a very serious competitor. Else they wouldn't be writing articles like these. Python's big rise came after hipster crowds got web frameworks written in Python. If you use hibernate or spring in Java, you can only come to love Python's web frameworks. But that time is long gone now. The crowd went to newer languages like Scala and Go. For all practical popularity purposes. Perl and Python are the very same these days. If you are really worried about popularity. Lets talk of Python's falling popularity compared to languages like Go and Scala. >>By the late 2000s Python was not only the dominant alternative to Perl for many text parsing tasks typically associated with Perl When it comes to serious text parsing work, Perl is still the only practical alternative you have. Ever checked upon Perl's Unicode capabilities? >>2000 – present[/b] Perl 6 "in development" The development of Perl 6 didn't start in 2000. And Perl 6 and Python aren't even in the same league for comparison. However the author completely misses the point. I can sit on top of a high priority production issue, just have a big log file. If all I have is that- Perl has the tools to help me get my job done in a couple of hours. Call me back, when Python can help me do that. >>Perl 6 has been an ongoing development since 2000. Yet after 14 years it is not officially done, making it the equivalent of Chinese Democracy for Guns N’ Roses Comparing Perl 6 and Python's progress is a bit ridiculous. Merely the ambition and audacity of what Perl 6 is aiming to achieve is what Python would like to in the next 20-30 years of iterative development. Perl 6 is not your usual language which aims a different syntactical style for decision and iterative statements and then calls it progress. A simple tour of the Perl 6 spec can help you on that.

signal9 13y ago

My me-too post. I was a web developer working nearly exclusively in Perl during the time period the author describes. I understand the author's lack of a handle on the period as he was, as he describes, in middle school at the time. Me, I had a job and a family and I was an actual Perl programmer. Come at me bro. That aside, the description of a transition of developers from Perl to Python just didn't happen the way it is described in the article. Or, to be fair, it didn't happen that way for me. I worked on a team extracting data from a number of disparate data sources and presenting reports on the web - basically the idiomatic Perl task. We tried to bring in PHP for a bit but found it wanting. As our jobs evolved out from under us, each of us moved on from Perl. Reporting jobs were becoming largely obsolete and there was market demand for working in other languages elsewhere. Being the early oughts, most of the engineers I knew had at least a few languages in their repertoire. Of the developers I worked with, I was the only one to pick up Python. I remember feeling like I wanted to work with a dynamic language where OO was more core to the language feature set. Ruby and Python were both viable, though less known, options. I don't remember why I chose Python over Ruby, but I did. My colleagues went on to work in Java or C#. Over time, I did a bit of both as well, especially C#. One buddy of mine still does his personal and peripheral scripting in Perl. I've largely forgotten the language. Back on topic, I simply did not see an exodus of developers from Perl to Python. It just didn't happen that way within my community. Jobs got phased out, new ones began, often with new tools. Off topic, what I did see at the time was a large movement of COBOL developers to JAVA. I saw that as a genuine migration, in earnest, of developers who were facing obsolescence.