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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 the

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.

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.