14 ms·

Why Perl Didn't Win

178 points by aiurtourist 12y ago

pyre 12y ago
It's no wonder there are issues with Perl 5 to 6 transition they went from: > They're going to merge Perl 5.12 and Perl 6 in "mid-2001" to: > There's a Perl 5.8 on the way in 2002. ^_~ That said, I think that anyone doing serious Perl 5.x work has long since abandoned the idea that Perl 6 has anything to do with Perl 5.x other than sharing the "Perl" name and Larry Wall. Maybe this is confusing to "outsiders" and the branding needs to change? It's not like the Perl 5.x line is not being maintained. Since Perl 5.10, there were some significant improvements, with consistent point releases coming out.
- bmn_ 12y ago
  The branding will not change, for BDFL reasons. The best all we can do is coming to grips with Perl 6 not being a successor, but a sibling.
BuckRogers 12y ago
I'd disagree with the assessment of Python3 somehow being sunset in 2020. This 2020 End of Life stuff is a marketing tactic to sell it. There are companies with 500K line codebases of Python that won't be on Python3 in 2020, if ever. It's just not feasible when new features have to be shipped. Expect pain (not for the companies in question, for Python3), in the form of a fork. The book isn't closed on this one yet. I can't help but think that we'll eventually be seeing "Why Python3 Didn't Win". Perl and Python both foolishly abdicated the throne. While shots are fired, I think Python3 could still recover with more compromises from its 'leadership'.
- pyre 12y ago
  While you may end up being right, Perl6 is a much larger departure from Perl5 (than Python3 is from Python2). Can one even use CPAN with Perl6? Is it even possible to convert existing Perl5 CPAN packages to support both versions at the same time (like all of the PyPI packages that support both Python2 and Python3)?
  - BuckRogers 12y ago
    It is a different departure, and it isn't a 1:1 comparison. That's true. But Python3 is an obvious failure and no one is admitting it, yet. I've seen claims from the core dev team about how Python3 is doing well because it has more downloads from Python.org, which is so stupid I won't even address it. A comparison of PyPI download statistics says it all. Python3 migration had many ridiculous ways of pushing people to migrate. The answer for Python3's adoption was always something new. It reads like the list of reasons for invading Iraq. Originally (and today's) overly optimistic EOL for Python2, then automated code conversion utilities, then porting all the major libraries, then 'six' type libraries to allow an ugly PythonX middle ground, then adding 3.x-only new features as a carrot, now the bright idea from the core dev team is to focus on pushing Python3 as the default install on distros. They all failed. Python3 as default on most distros won't do anything either. All that said, and I think this is the best-case scenario: Python3 will survive and eventually thrive. It will just be a shadow of Python's former glory. Is that -really- worth forcing unicode handling? For Zeus' sake, I wouldn't think so. This coming from someone who agrees with the change in theory.
    - bane 12y ago
      > Is that -really- worth forcing unicode handling? I dunno. I'm new to Python (version 2 so far) and I easily spend 25-50% of my coding time fighting with ascii/unicode issues in Python. I wish Python 2.x just did something smarter. Similar, but not quite as bad, is the need for me to put str() around non-string values in concatenation. Just f'ing doing it for me. I'll write a bunch of code, put together a message in a concatenation only to have it blow up at run-time because of this. sigh I really miss Perl's implicit behaviors sometimes. I dunno, maybe this all is making me a better programmer and person, forcing me to really deal with Unicode now, and breaking me of lots of Perl bad habits. But it's really one of the sucky parts of the language. There's some days, after spending half the day fighting with this issue, that I almost decide to dump the whole thing and switch to Python 3.
      - BuckRogers 12y ago
        The problem is that both support unicode and 2 vs 3 unicode handling are just two different ways to do it. Which places Python3 firmly in the 'technological churn' category, rather than true technical innovation. I'd probably agree 3.x is more Pythonic in this regard, but I think it was an ill-advised move. Plenty of reasoning in my last response as to why. Why not go ahead and use Python3, you may find it works for you. For me, there's a long tail of libraries that don't exist there, and frankly following the core dev teams' example- we should all act in our own best interests. I'm far more productive in 2.x. I may eventually move to 3.x, but it will have to be based on its merits. Rather than dogma, salesmanship or propaganda. Today it isn't even close to 2.x and we're nearing 7 years since 3.0 was released. Unlike most things in life such as updating some software package, the "latest version" of a programming language isn't always in your best interests. I think this is a hard mental barrier to break down, especially people coming into Python now. But I would always recommend learning/using 2.x, not only is it easier to build cool things with it (the whole point), but you have to learn 2.x. You can avoid 3 entirely, without any issue whatsoever.
- sago 12y ago
  I know of a large Python 1.6 code base still in constant use. I don't think this is unique to 'major breaking updates' or Python 3. Hell, there are codebases still in Fortran 77 doing key work. And why would you need to fork Python 3 to support Python 2 codebases?
philwelch 12y ago
Perl 6 didn't win because the successors to Perl were Python and Ruby, not Perl 6. Agreed, Perl 6 is a sophisticated language, but Python and Ruby have mature VMs you can use today. For values of "today" ranging back in time upwards of ten years.
- angersock 12y ago
  Yep. I've heard it put "Ruby is the best of Perl, without the rest of Perl".
McGlockenshire 12y ago
This article is pretty much spot on. I lived through this era and experienced the downfall of perl web applications first hand. My employer produced an amazingly popular perl-based web application, using flat files for data storage because so few shared hosts had DBI and DBD::mysql installed. It's some gloriously horrible code. They did a ground-up rewrite and then hired me to maintain it, right as PHP was becoming popular. They refused to do a PHP version until it was too late. Someone else translated our code into PHP, then rewrote it a few times before releasing it. Over just a year or two, our marketshare plummeted, and now the UBB is a distant memory. We couldn't deliver a competing product. Even if perl hadn't lost the deployability battle, the perl 6 fiasco was what let python and company eat away at the mindshare that wasn't concerned with just web applications.
- pdknsk 12y ago
  I immediately knew it was Ultimate Bulletin Board when I read the first sentence of the second paragraph.
- nostrademons 12y ago
  Man, I remember UBB. I worked in a dot-com run exclusively by teenagers in 2000, and UBB was the go-to solution for forums. I also remember spending a day writing a Perl CGI script to do polls, since the idea of SaaS or outsourcing widgets on your website was in the far future, and everyone knew that you had to have all the source code for your site in cgi-bin. Those were the days.
- richardbrevig 12y ago
  I remember the days of the UBB. Flat file databases, what memories. I also recall UBB getting hacked because the data separator was a pipe bar and the code didn't check for that on input. SQL injection before SQL. Maybe I dreamt that. Either way, I remember my time with flat file databases.
  - McGlockenshire 12y ago
    Yup, that was pretty bad. The resulting filtering ended up causing a lot of trouble for folks not using Windows-1252 or something in the ISO-8859 family, as it'd replace pipes in post bodies with the HTML numeric entity for the pipe in that charset. A similar incident is one of the things that got me hired - I was the only one to actually pick up a phone and call their office and talk to tech support about the sheer size of the possible bug. The most fun security bug the previous major version had was a side effect of file naming. In order to prevent users from just downloading data files, every data file was given the .cgi extension and was always saved as 0777 because shared hosting sucks and nobody ever used suexec like they should. The file format for user records is the login name on the first line, and the plaintext password on the second, email on the third. Someone figured out that #, ! and / weren't filtered in usernames. See where this is going yet? If the directory containing member records was available inside the document root, someone could perform trivial remote command execution. The second most fun was people discovering XSS before it was called XSS. With some creative quoting, you could inject javascript into the markup. I'm just thankful nobody figured out CSRF, I'd have hated to figure out how to deal with that way back then...
riobard 12y ago
Anyone feeling that Python 3 is gonna do the same to Python as Perl 6 did to Perl?
- quanticle 12y ago
  Not at all. Unlike Perl 6, Python 3 1) exists 2) has a significant amount of library support and 3) is clearly intended to supplant Python 2. None of those points apply to Perl 6.
- pyre 12y ago
  As someone who has been both a Perl and a Python programmer, I don't feel like Python3 is going to kill Python. Why? - Python3 currently exists, and there is a large push to get the majority of the "big" packages to support it (many of which do currently support Python 2.x and Python3). - It's possible for a Python package to support both Python 2.x and Python3 at the same time or to program the Python 2.x version in such a way that converters like 2to3 can do the conversion for you. I'm aware of no such tools or capabilities between Perl 5.x and Perl 6. - Python3 isn't as ambitious as Perl 6 is/was. Edit: As to point #2, I recall that there may have existed (maybe it still does?) some project to use Perl 6's "reprogram the grammar" capabilities to turn Perl 6 into Perl 5. I'm not sure how I really feel about that though. There was also a time when there was some buzz around Parrot VM[1] that was associated with Perl 6 (I don't know if it was some official partnership or just some announcement of Perl 6 support in Parrot). [1] http://www.parrot.org/ http://www.parrot.org/
  - chhantyal 12y ago
    Indeed, big libraries supporting Python 3 is rapidly growing http://py3readiness.org http://py3readiness.org Heck, apart from few - even those which are not supporting Py3k now have alternative package in PyPi. So it's positive sign.
- drac 12y ago
  it feels more like Python 3 is similar to the transition between PHP 4 and 5. Painful, sure but ultimately not a deterrent to language adoption. I'm sad about this, I loved programming Perl a decade ago but the last side project I wrote in Perl was all the way back in 2010.
sulam 12y ago
Speaking as someone who lived through this period during the formative years of my programming career, the author has completely missed the most influential language of the time and, in my mind at least, the number reason why Perl lost. Yes, I'm talking about Java. It's easy to hate now, but Java back then replaced all the server-side Perl programming that I did in the space of about 3 years, from 1994 where CGI programming was king to 1995 and the applets craze to 1999 when I was still regularly having conversations with people about the benefits of Java vs Perl to 2001 when you were actively hurting your career by not learning Java (not least because it seemed like the only people hiring were doing enterprise Java with horrible things like EJB and CMP/BMP). Why did Java beat Perl? Well, there's a lot to that -- but at least part of it has to do with that fact that Java was simpler and didn't have nearly as many tricks up its sleeves (also known as the write-only problem). This is similar to the argument people today make when picking Go over other options like Scala. I also don't think it hurt that Java came out of Sun, which on the one hand was extremely influential because they sold the hardware everyone with money used, but on the other wasn't influential at all because they were "big iron" to the web's "why would I buy a Sparcstation when I can just put a PC under my desk?" Fundamentally, though, Java was very successful at becoming the language you wrote code in if you wanted to be taken seriously as a software engineer building web applications and you didn't already have 5+ years of C++ experience. Perl programmers didn't get the same respect, and so Perl died.
- nemo 12y ago
  There were two sides - PHP was eating a ton of share from Perl for people and businesses who just wanted to get some simple web thing going. Sun pulled out the "Java is Enterprise" card early and successfully marketed it as being a professional scalable web programming solution for enterprise class applications with a few targeted buzzwords for whatever market segment they were going for. Perl seemed like it was always looked at as an amateur tool (much as PHP/ASP generally were), while Java was taken seriously in "enterprise" spaces (largely due to Sun's success at marketing Java to businesses). There's a wrinkle, too. Perl isn't just a web thing. It was (and is) still used in "enterprise" spaces for scripting on servers. It's still out there being used to create scripts rather than applications. In that space Ruby/Python are competing, but there's still plenty of sysadmins who use Perl since it works.
nemo 12y ago
This was really good. The mix of PHP as a better solution for shared hosting (and its simplicity for beginners) and the horror story of Perl 6 were both big setbacks. Allison Randal wrote on the death of Perl a while back and had some observations worth nothing to understand how it fell: http://allisonrandal.com/2013/03/31/mythbusters-why-i-still-love-perl/ http://allisonrandal.com/2013/03/31/mythbusters-why-i-still-... I really liked working with Modern Perl, but rarely do anymore mostly since "nobody uses Perl" kills any suggestion even when it might be the right tool for the job. Ruby has become Perl 6 for me.
sago 12y ago
Rewriting your language, like any other piece of software, is a great way to lose your market position: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
- pjmlp 12y ago
  People forget that if one is forced to re-write the code, it might as well just use another language.
- ufmace 12y ago
  I mostly agree with Joel there. It's worth pointing out that if doing a from-scratch rewrite of your end-user app is a bad idea, then doing a from-scratch rewrite of your platform that will force all of your users to do from-scratch rewrites of their apps must be orders of magnitude worse.
- kamaal 12y ago
  Its a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. You have to evolve to survive. If you don't don't you may stay alive for a while. But you will die slowly.
beat 12y ago
You know what rocked? Perl 4. I started on Perl 4 in the mid-1990s. It was fantastic! I started replacing thousand-line C programs with hundred-line Perl programs that were more robust and worked better, and replacing shell scripts made of awkward sed/awk pipelines with neat, tight Perl. Arrays and hashes as first class data structures? Marvelous! Then Perl 5 ruined it all. The ridiculous, bloated "object oriented" syntax rendered it basically unreadable, without adding much useful functionality. The layers of syntax options forced teamwork-driven Perl (I wrote about 10k lines of it) to pay close attention to coding standards, closer than more consistent languages, just to not step on each other or have fights. Then along came Python and Ruby, which shared most of the benefits of Perl (scripting, mostly), but added very clean, elegant OO syntax. Everyone who actually cared about writing decent OO scripts switched. Plus Python had much better math libs, and Ruby soon had Rails. And Perl 6? Fourteen years and nothing to show for it, and it'll have to be backwards compatible to all the things violently wrong with Perl 5. There's no use case that isn't already covered by Python and Ruby. Unless some new technology comes along and Perl jumps in firstest with mostest (like Ruby did with Rails), no one will really care. The average age of Perl programmers has been increasing by about one year per year since 2002 or so. I don't see that changing anytime soon.
- silvestrov 12y ago
  The perl developers greatly underestimated the importance of syntactic sugar and familiarity. (Java was helped a lot by looking like C). PHP was much more friendly towards new programmers than Perl 5, it was so much easier to make simple web pages. So it took over. It didn't matter that Perl 5 was more advanced. (oh, you uploaded module to same dir and didn't remember to add something to @INC)
  - riffraff 12y ago
    > The perl developers greatly underestimated the importance of syntactic sugar and familiarity. I don't think that's the case. The problem is that the generation of tools that have stuff in common with perl (awk, sed, shell) are completely unfamiliar to programmers which started programming in the last 15 years, compared to those that started 30 years ago.
kijin 12y ago
I don't think Perl will ever recover from the Perl 6 fiasco, and I'm worried for Python for the same reason. PHP, on the other hand, handled the PHP 6 "failure" relatively gracefully. There was a bit of stagnation in the days of PHP 5.2 when the devs devoted too much energy to PHP 6 and not enough on improving the current version. But soon, PHP 6 was put on hold and some of its better parts began to be ported to PHP 5. Thanks to this decision, PHP has improved by leaps and bounds since 5.3. Also thanks to the lessons learned, nobody is particularly worried about any breaking changes in PHP for the foreseeable future. Everyone knows that any script that works in PHP 5.6 will probably work just fine in 7.0, so new projects continue to be written in PHP. This peace of mind is very important for languages that carry a lot of legacy baggage. If there's anything for other languages to learn from PHP, it would be their graceful handling of PHP 6 -> 5.3~5.6. The syntax is still terrible, and the default behavior remains borderline insane, but PHP since 2009 has been an exemplar of how a widely used scripting language should handle new versions.
- McGlockenshire 12y ago
  > Everyone knows that any script that works in PHP 5.6 will probably work just fine in 7.0 This is no longer strictly true. On Friday, the "let's remove all the deprecated stuff" RFC was passed. Anything that causes an E_DEPRECATED in 5.6 will now be a fatal in 7. For example, ext/ereg and ext/mysql are no longer included, and have been shipped off to PECL. Shouldn't be a problem for anyone that doesn't compile their own, really. A few php.ini settings are also now removed, which will fatal on startup. It'll be safe to say that if your code runs fine under 5.6 with error_reporting set to -1, then you'll probably run under 7 without too much trouble.
  - kijin 12y ago
    You're right, any code that runs without errors in 5.6 will probably run fine in 7.0. And that's exactly how deprecation is supposed to work! No massive changes, only incremental changes, and even those incremental changes come with at least a couple of years of grace period.
  - ars 12y ago
pjungwir 12y ago
I'm curious if anyone really expected Perl 6 to arrive like the article describes ("The problem wasn't apparent in 2000."). I was just a junior programmer, and I loved 5.6, but from the beginning 6 sounded to me like it would be a wholly different language, probably never delivered, and certainly never adopted. Maybe I'm projecting, but I felt that was a broad sentiment back then. By 2001 I was writing Python half time or more, and even though I felt a great fondness for Perl while Python left me cold, it still felt like it delivered everything Perl 6 aspired to (if you could stand the lack of regex literals, grr.....). Once Ruby became popular we got all the good things of Perl without the aridity of Python, so there was even less reason to care. In the late '00s I took a few years off programming to do a degree in Classics, and I kept telling myself half-jokingly that if Perl 6 shipped I'd know I'd been away too long. When Parrot was released I figured I'd better get back in the game. That's not to say Perl 6 wasn't needed. Among programming languages Perl was probably my first love, especially the linguistics tie-ins with $ @ % etc, but write-only was a real problem, and people were moving to Python on the one hand and Java on the other. Maybe PHP killed Perl for low-end cheap hosting, but for larger projects, among people who would never have considered PHP, it lost because picking it seemed irresponsible.
- CodeWriter23 12y ago
  I started calling it out as vaporware around the Holidays 2001. I would be shouted down by certain zealots who would tell me code (pre-Alpha quality) was available for use right now. At least there are people maintaining Perl 5 at this point.
  - ugexe 12y ago
    There are commits to Rakudo, a Perl 6 compiler, every day. It's also scheduled to be production ready by the end of 2015.
    - cturner 12y ago
      You might be right. But I have been reading forum posts to this effect for fifteen years, and eventually eveyone switches off. Even if you are right, would you trust your career focus to a software community who had got it this wrong for that long? I am looking forward to checking out a future perl 6 but part of that is now duke nukem forever curiosity - what on earth could be in it that kept those smart people at it for that long?
lacker 12y ago
If there was no Ruby, I suspect Perl would still be popular. At one point the scripting language holy wars were "Perl vs Python". That turned into "Ruby vs Python". Similar philosophy, lots of better stuff in Ruby.
- Blackthorn 12y ago
  Perl was dead long before Ruby on Rails was a big thing (Ruby itself was effectively moribund until Rails).
  - riffraff 12y ago
    > Ruby itself was effectively moribund until Rails I think you might mean "unknown" rather than "moribund", but just in case: no it wasn't, it was quite successful, RAA wasn't CPAN but was quite rich, there were steady improvements to the language and the community outside japan was growing (i.e. most of the european ruby user groups started before ruby on rails). It was just growing slowly, rather than skyrocketing.
    - wwweston 12y ago
      Which is to say: in pretty much the same position Perl is in now.
      - riffraff 12y ago
        well, the trend was upwards rather than downwards, I think that makes all the difference.
- gaius 12y ago
  Online yes - but a hell of a lot of Tcl was being written too, by people who just couldn't be bothered posting about it.
  - biomimic 12y ago
    Tcl was and still is undiscovered gold.
EdSharkey 12y ago
I think it is cool to think of one's self as the hero in the story of their life. You battle adversaries, have little victories, complete long story arcs, find a sweetheart and have romance. I feel Perl does not deserve to be mentioned in a hero's tale. There's been too much rankling and nincompoopery out of perl's characters given the size of that community. Far, FAR too much griping. Perl is a bummer, and that is why it did not win. My philosophy is: live the life of a champion - overcome and be a shining light for others. Your war stories should be mostly glorious victories, no matter how mundane the battles or battlefields were.
- jnbiche 12y ago
  This is pretty good advice to live by. I should keep this in mind for myself.
  - juliangregorian 12y ago
    You're both joking right? I find myself wanting to google this guy in 5 years so I can see how much real life kicks his poetic ass.
etep 12y ago
Version number is micro, this is a macro question, to wit, the following: When I converted a perl script to python and saved 50% LOC I didn't know which version of which I was using. Am only vaguely aware of the Python 2.x vs. 3 issues. Never was aware of Perl 5 vs. 6. When Python and Ruby fade, I look forward to the hand wringing about how version whatever didn't get pushed out fast enough. But that won't be the reason.
- chrisdone 12y ago
  But you're not a thousand companies who have built their business on Python 2 and have no interest in rewriting working code when they don't have to. Your "scripts" are pretty much irrelevant.
inDigiNeous 12y ago
Oh man, I remember hating to program Perl. With Perl, there wasn't just one way to do things, but there were 10, and all of those involved different combinations of @{} $[] [#] '%' characters put in seemingly random order and changing completely the context on which they operated, with the logic only clear to those who somehow understood the connection between these symbols and their meaning. Maybe it didn't win because the language syntax was just a mess, and same variables just in different contexts could mean like 3 different things depending on what way you pass them, what you you return them and what kind of random character is in front of them. Don't take this personally, just ranting out my feelings for the Perl programming language, and glad that it isn't one of the things I have to know anymore! Good riddance!
mrbig4545 12y ago
Define won. This is the way I see it. Perl5 is still being actively developed, perl6 is coming along nicely, cpan more awesome than ever, and there's still work for a perl dev. If everyone was using the same language, then we'd all suffer because no one would be getting the new ideas. Competition keeps things healthy.
p0nce 12y ago
When I was younger I pushed myself to know Perl 5. I tried to learn Perl with one book. It was surprinsingly hard. I took a simpler book. I also failed grasping Perl. Those were the two recommended books for learning. I've come to realize years after that Perl is simply difficult to learn, lots of little things to memorize. Its community took pride in language arcana. Things that are now simple in other languages are unbelievably difficult in Perl, like "hashes of arrays of hashes" and things like that. On top of that, it's also difficult to read. No wonder Perl is losing, and to me the faster the world is cleanup from that, the better.
- Mithaldu 12y ago
  You're incorrect in your realization. The truth is that the older books for learning perl are simply shitty. If you read Ovid's Beginning Perl, or chromatic's Modern Perl, you'll find they managed to explain the concepts very easily.
  - not_kurt_godel 12y ago
    No, he's right. Perl is shitty. Have you ever read a random Perl script? It's impossible to interpret.
    - Mithaldu 12y ago
      "No, he's right. Japanese is shitty. Have you ever read a random Japanese scroll? It's impossible to interpret. Even in romaji!"
- pwr22 12y ago
  Learning Perl is excellent for a beginner
- pwr22 12y ago
  https://gist.github.com/pwr22/c63c0e3f3309d0c95344 https://gist.github.com/pwr22/c63c0e3f3309d0c95344
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Walkman 12y ago
Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7866834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7866834
jimfuller2014 12y ago
Perl did win, for a period of time .. expecting an interpreted language to dominate for multiple decades is unrealistic, especially with hardware advances that occur over time. while I don't do anything with it today, I do know Perl/6 would be in contention for my 'deserted island' language of choice. yet another dph
- jerf 12y ago
  I have to agree; if Perl didn't "win", then who did? Python? Very popular. Solid language. Probably at some point more adopted than Perl, but not so much so that I can say it "won", partially because of how this list goes on. Ruby? Same. PHP? Maybe in the web space but not in general. Javascript? Even in light of Node, this is still a marginal language out of the browser, especially considered over the past 15 years. Lua? No. Perl may not have "won" but it has hardly "lost", and now IMHO the sun is just beginning to set on this entire catagory of 1990s-style dynamic scripting language and there probably will be no further "winner" in this space.
jrochkind1 12y ago
The "Maintenance and greenfield concerns are very different" section is relevant to my interests: > The implications for a programming language are difficult to prove conclusively, but simple to explain: an ecosystem focused more on maintaining existing projects than creating new projects will be less attractive for new projects. Ruby/Rails provides an interesting example here. The ruby and rails community ecosystem (the author is right it's about "ecosystem" more than the language) -- has, in general, done it's best to focus as much as possible on innovation over stability. That is, has tried to choose focus on creating new projects over support for existing projects. Much to the frustration of some in the ruby ecosystem with existing projects to support. (Rails, of course, from one perspective is an existing project; from another is a framework, which has generally over it's history cared more about new projects that will be created with Rails than existing projects built on Rails that need to be supported). Of course, there still are existing projects, and there are still developers participating in the ecosystem who need to support those existing projects. So you can only go so far. What has this done for ruby/rails ecosystem? Hard to say. Overall it's been successful, but it still can't make the ecosystem as greenfield as a true greenfield ecosystem, which is perhaps why some are leaving ruby/rails for greener pastures -- more than any qualities of ruby as a language, it's just the opportunity to be in a greenfield ecosystem that is attractive, perhaps.
tudorconstantin 12y ago
[probably shameless plug] I first intended to write this as an answer, but I ended up with a complete blog post: http://programming.tudorconstantin.com/2015/01/perl-already-won.html http://programming.tudorconstantin.com/2015/01/perl-already-...
- chromatic 12y ago
  Watch out for whoever says that Perl is an ancient technology, because they're either ignorant and completely clueless about what's really happening in the world of computer programming, or they have hidden agendas. That's a strong statement. Are you quite sure those are the only two possibilities?
  - tudorconstantin 12y ago
    There's this Perl book called Modern Perl. It is written to help others learn about the new technologies available to Perl world. Do you know about the book? oh, you wrote it :) So yeah, if they don't have hidden agendas and they say that writing Perl apps means writing apps in an old fashion, the only possible alternative is to be ignorant :)
    - chromatic 12y ago
      I think Perl didn't win. I don't know the specific context of Romania, but from where I sit, it's unlikely I'll get paid to program in it in the foreseeable future, if ever. What's my hidden agenda in agreeing with this article over yours?
      - tudorconstantin 12y ago
        The article has valid points. Hidden agenda is when people say that writing Perl is equivalent to using ancient technologies, solely because Perl had its popularity peak in the nineties - and this might also be a reason why you can't be paid for doing Perl - who would want legacy technologies in their stack? It's just that, well, it isn't legacy. It's more up to date and much more robust than many of the hip languages.
unlinguaf 12y ago
nothing to show for perl6? it's shipping in 2015.
jjn1056 12y ago
Not sure what 'winning is'... I've had a great career in Perl so far and every company I've worked at has been a startup using Perl (not old legacy code). So that's like almost 20 years and every year someone says, "Perl is dead", etc. And every year I just have a blast programming Perl. I've met a ton of great people and I enjoy contributing to open source. So I would say quite complaining about something you personally don't like and get on with doing something useful.
jjn1056 12y ago
and I want to add, I am so looking forward to having this exact conversation 5, 10 and 20 years from now...

178 points by aiurtourist 12y ago

pyre 12y ago

It's no wonder there are issues with Perl 5 to 6 transition they went from: > They're going to merge Perl 5.12 and Perl 6 in "mid-2001" to: > There's a Perl 5.8 on the way in 2002. ^_~ That said, I think that anyone doing serious Perl 5.x work has long since abandoned the idea that Perl 6 has anything to do with Perl 5.x other than sharing the "Perl" name and Larry Wall. Maybe this is confusing to "outsiders" and the branding needs to change? It's not like the Perl 5.x line is not being maintained. Since Perl 5.10, there were some significant improvements, with consistent point releases coming out.

bmn_ 12y ago
The branding will not change, for BDFL reasons. The best all we can do is coming to grips with Perl 6 not being a successor, but a sibling.

BuckRogers 12y ago

I'd disagree with the assessment of Python3 somehow being sunset in 2020. This 2020 End of Life stuff is a marketing tactic to sell it. There are companies with 500K line codebases of Python that won't be on Python3 in 2020, if ever. It's just not feasible when new features have to be shipped. Expect pain (not for the companies in question, for Python3), in the form of a fork. The book isn't closed on this one yet. I can't help but think that we'll eventually be seeing "Why Python3 Didn't Win". Perl and Python both foolishly abdicated the throne. While shots are fired, I think Python3 could still recover with more compromises from its 'leadership'.

pyre 12y ago
While you may end up being right, Perl6 is a much larger departure from Perl5 (than Python3 is from Python2). Can one even use CPAN with Perl6? Is it even possible to convert existing Perl5 CPAN packages to support both versions at the same time (like all of the PyPI packages that support both Python2 and Python3)?
- BuckRogers 12y ago
  It is a different departure, and it isn't a 1:1 comparison. That's true. But Python3 is an obvious failure and no one is admitting it, yet. I've seen claims from the core dev team about how Python3 is doing well because it has more downloads from Python.org, which is so stupid I won't even address it. A comparison of PyPI download statistics says it all. Python3 migration had many ridiculous ways of pushing people to migrate. The answer for Python3's adoption was always something new. It reads like the list of reasons for invading Iraq. Originally (and today's) overly optimistic EOL for Python2, then automated code conversion utilities, then porting all the major libraries, then 'six' type libraries to allow an ugly PythonX middle ground, then adding 3.x-only new features as a carrot, now the bright idea from the core dev team is to focus on pushing Python3 as the default install on distros. They all failed. Python3 as default on most distros won't do anything either. All that said, and I think this is the best-case scenario: Python3 will survive and eventually thrive. It will just be a shadow of Python's former glory. Is that -really- worth forcing unicode handling? For Zeus' sake, I wouldn't think so. This coming from someone who agrees with the change in theory.
  - bane 12y ago
    > Is that -really- worth forcing unicode handling? I dunno. I'm new to Python (version 2 so far) and I easily spend 25-50% of my coding time fighting with ascii/unicode issues in Python. I wish Python 2.x just did something smarter. Similar, but not quite as bad, is the need for me to put str() around non-string values in concatenation. Just f'ing doing it for me. I'll write a bunch of code, put together a message in a concatenation only to have it blow up at run-time because of this. sigh I really miss Perl's implicit behaviors sometimes. I dunno, maybe this all is making me a better programmer and person, forcing me to really deal with Unicode now, and breaking me of lots of Perl bad habits. But it's really one of the sucky parts of the language. There's some days, after spending half the day fighting with this issue, that I almost decide to dump the whole thing and switch to Python 3.
    - BuckRogers 12y ago
      The problem is that both support unicode and 2 vs 3 unicode handling are just two different ways to do it. Which places Python3 firmly in the 'technological churn' category, rather than true technical innovation. I'd probably agree 3.x is more Pythonic in this regard, but I think it was an ill-advised move. Plenty of reasoning in my last response as to why. Why not go ahead and use Python3, you may find it works for you. For me, there's a long tail of libraries that don't exist there, and frankly following the core dev teams' example- we should all act in our own best interests. I'm far more productive in 2.x. I may eventually move to 3.x, but it will have to be based on its merits. Rather than dogma, salesmanship or propaganda. Today it isn't even close to 2.x and we're nearing 7 years since 3.0 was released. Unlike most things in life such as updating some software package, the "latest version" of a programming language isn't always in your best interests. I think this is a hard mental barrier to break down, especially people coming into Python now. But I would always recommend learning/using 2.x, not only is it easier to build cool things with it (the whole point), but you have to learn 2.x. You can avoid 3 entirely, without any issue whatsoever.
sago 12y ago
I know of a large Python 1.6 code base still in constant use. I don't think this is unique to 'major breaking updates' or Python 3. Hell, there are codebases still in Fortran 77 doing key work. And why would you need to fork Python 3 to support Python 2 codebases?

philwelch 12y ago

Perl 6 didn't win because the successors to Perl were Python and Ruby, not Perl 6. Agreed, Perl 6 is a sophisticated language, but Python and Ruby have mature VMs you can use today. For values of "today" ranging back in time upwards of ten years.

angersock 12y ago
Yep. I've heard it put "Ruby is the best of Perl, without the rest of Perl".

McGlockenshire 12y ago

This article is pretty much spot on. I lived through this era and experienced the downfall of perl web applications first hand. My employer produced an amazingly popular perl-based web application, using flat files for data storage because so few shared hosts had DBI and DBD::mysql installed. It's some gloriously horrible code. They did a ground-up rewrite and then hired me to maintain it, right as PHP was becoming popular. They refused to do a PHP version until it was too late. Someone else translated our code into PHP, then rewrote it a few times before releasing it. Over just a year or two, our marketshare plummeted, and now the UBB is a distant memory. We couldn't deliver a competing product. Even if perl hadn't lost the deployability battle, the perl 6 fiasco was what let python and company eat away at the mindshare that wasn't concerned with just web applications.

pdknsk 12y ago
I immediately knew it was Ultimate Bulletin Board when I read the first sentence of the second paragraph.
nostrademons 12y ago
Man, I remember UBB. I worked in a dot-com run exclusively by teenagers in 2000, and UBB was the go-to solution for forums. I also remember spending a day writing a Perl CGI script to do polls, since the idea of SaaS or outsourcing widgets on your website was in the far future, and everyone knew that you had to have all the source code for your site in cgi-bin. Those were the days.
richardbrevig 12y ago
I remember the days of the UBB. Flat file databases, what memories. I also recall UBB getting hacked because the data separator was a pipe bar and the code didn't check for that on input. SQL injection before SQL. Maybe I dreamt that. Either way, I remember my time with flat file databases.
- McGlockenshire 12y ago
  Yup, that was pretty bad. The resulting filtering ended up causing a lot of trouble for folks not using Windows-1252 or something in the ISO-8859 family, as it'd replace pipes in post bodies with the HTML numeric entity for the pipe in that charset. A similar incident is one of the things that got me hired - I was the only one to actually pick up a phone and call their office and talk to tech support about the sheer size of the possible bug. The most fun security bug the previous major version had was a side effect of file naming. In order to prevent users from just downloading data files, every data file was given the .cgi extension and was always saved as 0777 because shared hosting sucks and nobody ever used suexec like they should. The file format for user records is the login name on the first line, and the plaintext password on the second, email on the third. Someone figured out that #, ! and / weren't filtered in usernames. See where this is going yet? If the directory containing member records was available inside the document root, someone could perform trivial remote command execution. The second most fun was people discovering XSS before it was called XSS. With some creative quoting, you could inject javascript into the markup. I'm just thankful nobody figured out CSRF, I'd have hated to figure out how to deal with that way back then...

riobard 12y ago

Anyone feeling that Python 3 is gonna do the same to Python as Perl 6 did to Perl?

quanticle 12y ago
Not at all. Unlike Perl 6, Python 3 1) exists 2) has a significant amount of library support and 3) is clearly intended to supplant Python 2. None of those points apply to Perl 6.
pyre 12y ago
As someone who has been both a Perl and a Python programmer, I don't feel like Python3 is going to kill Python. Why? - Python3 currently exists, and there is a large push to get the majority of the "big" packages to support it (many of which do currently support Python 2.x and Python3). - It's possible for a Python package to support both Python 2.x and Python3 at the same time or to program the Python 2.x version in such a way that converters like 2to3 can do the conversion for you. I'm aware of no such tools or capabilities between Perl 5.x and Perl 6. - Python3 isn't as ambitious as Perl 6 is/was. Edit: As to point #2, I recall that there may have existed (maybe it still does?) some project to use Perl 6's "reprogram the grammar" capabilities to turn Perl 6 into Perl 5. I'm not sure how I really feel about that though. There was also a time when there was some buzz around Parrot VM[1] that was associated with Perl 6 (I don't know if it was some official partnership or just some announcement of Perl 6 support in Parrot). [1] http://www.parrot.org/ http://www.parrot.org/
- chhantyal 12y ago
  Indeed, big libraries supporting Python 3 is rapidly growing http://py3readiness.org http://py3readiness.org Heck, apart from few - even those which are not supporting Py3k now have alternative package in PyPi. So it's positive sign.
drac 12y ago
it feels more like Python 3 is similar to the transition between PHP 4 and 5. Painful, sure but ultimately not a deterrent to language adoption. I'm sad about this, I loved programming Perl a decade ago but the last side project I wrote in Perl was all the way back in 2010.

sulam 12y ago

Speaking as someone who lived through this period during the formative years of my programming career, the author has completely missed the most influential language of the time and, in my mind at least, the number reason why Perl lost. Yes, I'm talking about Java. It's easy to hate now, but Java back then replaced all the server-side Perl programming that I did in the space of about 3 years, from 1994 where CGI programming was king to 1995 and the applets craze to 1999 when I was still regularly having conversations with people about the benefits of Java vs Perl to 2001 when you were actively hurting your career by not learning Java (not least because it seemed like the only people hiring were doing enterprise Java with horrible things like EJB and CMP/BMP). Why did Java beat Perl? Well, there's a lot to that -- but at least part of it has to do with that fact that Java was simpler and didn't have nearly as many tricks up its sleeves (also known as the write-only problem). This is similar to the argument people today make when picking Go over other options like Scala. I also don't think it hurt that Java came out of Sun, which on the one hand was extremely influential because they sold the hardware everyone with money used, but on the other wasn't influential at all because they were "big iron" to the web's "why would I buy a Sparcstation when I can just put a PC under my desk?" Fundamentally, though, Java was very successful at becoming the language you wrote code in if you wanted to be taken seriously as a software engineer building web applications and you didn't already have 5+ years of C++ experience. Perl programmers didn't get the same respect, and so Perl died.

nemo 12y ago
There were two sides - PHP was eating a ton of share from Perl for people and businesses who just wanted to get some simple web thing going. Sun pulled out the "Java is Enterprise" card early and successfully marketed it as being a professional scalable web programming solution for enterprise class applications with a few targeted buzzwords for whatever market segment they were going for. Perl seemed like it was always looked at as an amateur tool (much as PHP/ASP generally were), while Java was taken seriously in "enterprise" spaces (largely due to Sun's success at marketing Java to businesses). There's a wrinkle, too. Perl isn't just a web thing. It was (and is) still used in "enterprise" spaces for scripting on servers. It's still out there being used to create scripts rather than applications. In that space Ruby/Python are competing, but there's still plenty of sysadmins who use Perl since it works.

nemo 12y ago

This was really good. The mix of PHP as a better solution for shared hosting (and its simplicity for beginners) and the horror story of Perl 6 were both big setbacks. Allison Randal wrote on the death of Perl a while back and had some observations worth nothing to understand how it fell: http://allisonrandal.com/2013/03/31/mythbusters-why-i-still-love-perl/ http://allisonrandal.com/2013/03/31/mythbusters-why-i-still-... I really liked working with Modern Perl, but rarely do anymore mostly since "nobody uses Perl" kills any suggestion even when it might be the right tool for the job. Ruby has become Perl 6 for me.

sago 12y ago

Rewriting your language, like any other piece of software, is a great way to lose your market position: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

pjmlp 12y ago
People forget that if one is forced to re-write the code, it might as well just use another language.
ufmace 12y ago
I mostly agree with Joel there. It's worth pointing out that if doing a from-scratch rewrite of your end-user app is a bad idea, then doing a from-scratch rewrite of your platform that will force all of your users to do from-scratch rewrites of their apps must be orders of magnitude worse.
kamaal 12y ago
Its a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. You have to evolve to survive. If you don't don't you may stay alive for a while. But you will die slowly.

beat 12y ago

You know what rocked? Perl 4. I started on Perl 4 in the mid-1990s. It was fantastic! I started replacing thousand-line C programs with hundred-line Perl programs that were more robust and worked better, and replacing shell scripts made of awkward sed/awk pipelines with neat, tight Perl. Arrays and hashes as first class data structures? Marvelous! Then Perl 5 ruined it all. The ridiculous, bloated "object oriented" syntax rendered it basically unreadable, without adding much useful functionality. The layers of syntax options forced teamwork-driven Perl (I wrote about 10k lines of it) to pay close attention to coding standards, closer than more consistent languages, just to not step on each other or have fights. Then along came Python and Ruby, which shared most of the benefits of Perl (scripting, mostly), but added very clean, elegant OO syntax. Everyone who actually cared about writing decent OO scripts switched. Plus Python had much better math libs, and Ruby soon had Rails. And Perl 6? Fourteen years and nothing to show for it, and it'll have to be backwards compatible to all the things violently wrong with Perl 5. There's no use case that isn't already covered by Python and Ruby. Unless some new technology comes along and Perl jumps in firstest with mostest (like Ruby did with Rails), no one will really care. The average age of Perl programmers has been increasing by about one year per year since 2002 or so. I don't see that changing anytime soon.

silvestrov 12y ago
The perl developers greatly underestimated the importance of syntactic sugar and familiarity. (Java was helped a lot by looking like C). PHP was much more friendly towards new programmers than Perl 5, it was so much easier to make simple web pages. So it took over. It didn't matter that Perl 5 was more advanced. (oh, you uploaded module to same dir and didn't remember to add something to @INC)
- riffraff 12y ago
  > The perl developers greatly underestimated the importance of syntactic sugar and familiarity. I don't think that's the case. The problem is that the generation of tools that have stuff in common with perl (awk, sed, shell) are completely unfamiliar to programmers which started programming in the last 15 years, compared to those that started 30 years ago.

kijin 12y ago

I don't think Perl will ever recover from the Perl 6 fiasco, and I'm worried for Python for the same reason. PHP, on the other hand, handled the PHP 6 "failure" relatively gracefully. There was a bit of stagnation in the days of PHP 5.2 when the devs devoted too much energy to PHP 6 and not enough on improving the current version. But soon, PHP 6 was put on hold and some of its better parts began to be ported to PHP 5. Thanks to this decision, PHP has improved by leaps and bounds since 5.3. Also thanks to the lessons learned, nobody is particularly worried about any breaking changes in PHP for the foreseeable future. Everyone knows that any script that works in PHP 5.6 will probably work just fine in 7.0, so new projects continue to be written in PHP. This peace of mind is very important for languages that carry a lot of legacy baggage. If there's anything for other languages to learn from PHP, it would be their graceful handling of PHP 6 -> 5.3~5.6. The syntax is still terrible, and the default behavior remains borderline insane, but PHP since 2009 has been an exemplar of how a widely used scripting language should handle new versions.

McGlockenshire 12y ago
> Everyone knows that any script that works in PHP 5.6 will probably work just fine in 7.0 This is no longer strictly true. On Friday, the "let's remove all the deprecated stuff" RFC was passed. Anything that causes an E_DEPRECATED in 5.6 will now be a fatal in 7. For example, ext/ereg and ext/mysql are no longer included, and have been shipped off to PECL. Shouldn't be a problem for anyone that doesn't compile their own, really. A few php.ini settings are also now removed, which will fatal on startup. It'll be safe to say that if your code runs fine under 5.6 with error_reporting set to -1, then you'll probably run under 7 without too much trouble.
- kijin 12y ago
  You're right, any code that runs without errors in 5.6 will probably run fine in 7.0. And that's exactly how deprecation is supposed to work! No massive changes, only incremental changes, and even those incremental changes come with at least a couple of years of grace period.
- ars 12y ago

pjungwir 12y ago

I'm curious if anyone really expected Perl 6 to arrive like the article describes ("The problem wasn't apparent in 2000."). I was just a junior programmer, and I loved 5.6, but from the beginning 6 sounded to me like it would be a wholly different language, probably never delivered, and certainly never adopted. Maybe I'm projecting, but I felt that was a broad sentiment back then. By 2001 I was writing Python half time or more, and even though I felt a great fondness for Perl while Python left me cold, it still felt like it delivered everything Perl 6 aspired to (if you could stand the lack of regex literals, grr.....). Once Ruby became popular we got all the good things of Perl without the aridity of Python, so there was even less reason to care. In the late '00s I took a few years off programming to do a degree in Classics, and I kept telling myself half-jokingly that if Perl 6 shipped I'd know I'd been away too long. When Parrot was released I figured I'd better get back in the game. That's not to say Perl 6 wasn't needed. Among programming languages Perl was probably my first love, especially the linguistics tie-ins with $ @ % etc, but write-only was a real problem, and people were moving to Python on the one hand and Java on the other. Maybe PHP killed Perl for low-end cheap hosting, but for larger projects, among people who would never have considered PHP, it lost because picking it seemed irresponsible.

CodeWriter23 12y ago
I started calling it out as vaporware around the Holidays 2001. I would be shouted down by certain zealots who would tell me code (pre-Alpha quality) was available for use right now. At least there are people maintaining Perl 5 at this point.
- ugexe 12y ago
  There are commits to Rakudo, a Perl 6 compiler, every day. It's also scheduled to be production ready by the end of 2015.
  - cturner 12y ago
    You might be right. But I have been reading forum posts to this effect for fifteen years, and eventually eveyone switches off. Even if you are right, would you trust your career focus to a software community who had got it this wrong for that long? I am looking forward to checking out a future perl 6 but part of that is now duke nukem forever curiosity - what on earth could be in it that kept those smart people at it for that long?

lacker 12y ago

If there was no Ruby, I suspect Perl would still be popular. At one point the scripting language holy wars were "Perl vs Python". That turned into "Ruby vs Python". Similar philosophy, lots of better stuff in Ruby.

Blackthorn 12y ago
Perl was dead long before Ruby on Rails was a big thing (Ruby itself was effectively moribund until Rails).
- riffraff 12y ago
  > Ruby itself was effectively moribund until Rails I think you might mean "unknown" rather than "moribund", but just in case: no it wasn't, it was quite successful, RAA wasn't CPAN but was quite rich, there were steady improvements to the language and the community outside japan was growing (i.e. most of the european ruby user groups started before ruby on rails). It was just growing slowly, rather than skyrocketing.
  - wwweston 12y ago
    Which is to say: in pretty much the same position Perl is in now.
    - riffraff 12y ago
      well, the trend was upwards rather than downwards, I think that makes all the difference.
gaius 12y ago
Online yes - but a hell of a lot of Tcl was being written too, by people who just couldn't be bothered posting about it.
- biomimic 12y ago
  Tcl was and still is undiscovered gold.

EdSharkey 12y ago

I think it is cool to think of one's self as the hero in the story of their life. You battle adversaries, have little victories, complete long story arcs, find a sweetheart and have romance. I feel Perl does not deserve to be mentioned in a hero's tale. There's been too much rankling and nincompoopery out of perl's characters given the size of that community. Far, FAR too much griping. Perl is a bummer, and that is why it did not win. My philosophy is: live the life of a champion - overcome and be a shining light for others. Your war stories should be mostly glorious victories, no matter how mundane the battles or battlefields were.

jnbiche 12y ago
This is pretty good advice to live by. I should keep this in mind for myself.
- juliangregorian 12y ago
  You're both joking right? I find myself wanting to google this guy in 5 years so I can see how much real life kicks his poetic ass.

etep 12y ago

Version number is micro, this is a macro question, to wit, the following: When I converted a perl script to python and saved 50% LOC I didn't know which version of which I was using. Am only vaguely aware of the Python 2.x vs. 3 issues. Never was aware of Perl 5 vs. 6. When Python and Ruby fade, I look forward to the hand wringing about how version whatever didn't get pushed out fast enough. But that won't be the reason.

chrisdone 12y ago
But you're not a thousand companies who have built their business on Python 2 and have no interest in rewriting working code when they don't have to. Your "scripts" are pretty much irrelevant.

inDigiNeous 12y ago

Oh man, I remember hating to program Perl. With Perl, there wasn't just one way to do things, but there were 10, and all of those involved different combinations of @{} $[] [#] '%' characters put in seemingly random order and changing completely the context on which they operated, with the logic only clear to those who somehow understood the connection between these symbols and their meaning. Maybe it didn't win because the language syntax was just a mess, and same variables just in different contexts could mean like 3 different things depending on what way you pass them, what you you return them and what kind of random character is in front of them. Don't take this personally, just ranting out my feelings for the Perl programming language, and glad that it isn't one of the things I have to know anymore! Good riddance!

mrbig4545 12y ago

Define won. This is the way I see it. Perl5 is still being actively developed, perl6 is coming along nicely, cpan more awesome than ever, and there's still work for a perl dev. If everyone was using the same language, then we'd all suffer because no one would be getting the new ideas. Competition keeps things healthy.

p0nce 12y ago

When I was younger I pushed myself to know Perl 5. I tried to learn Perl with one book. It was surprinsingly hard. I took a simpler book. I also failed grasping Perl. Those were the two recommended books for learning. I've come to realize years after that Perl is simply difficult to learn, lots of little things to memorize. Its community took pride in language arcana. Things that are now simple in other languages are unbelievably difficult in Perl, like "hashes of arrays of hashes" and things like that. On top of that, it's also difficult to read. No wonder Perl is losing, and to me the faster the world is cleanup from that, the better.

Mithaldu 12y ago
You're incorrect in your realization. The truth is that the older books for learning perl are simply shitty. If you read Ovid's Beginning Perl, or chromatic's Modern Perl, you'll find they managed to explain the concepts very easily.
- not_kurt_godel 12y ago
  No, he's right. Perl is shitty. Have you ever read a random Perl script? It's impossible to interpret.
  - Mithaldu 12y ago
    "No, he's right. Japanese is shitty. Have you ever read a random Japanese scroll? It's impossible to interpret. Even in romaji!"
pwr22 12y ago
Learning Perl is excellent for a beginner
pwr22 12y ago
https://gist.github.com/pwr22/c63c0e3f3309d0c95344 https://gist.github.com/pwr22/c63c0e3f3309d0c95344

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Walkman 12y ago

Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7866834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7866834

jimfuller2014 12y ago

Perl did win, for a period of time .. expecting an interpreted language to dominate for multiple decades is unrealistic, especially with hardware advances that occur over time. while I don't do anything with it today, I do know Perl/6 would be in contention for my 'deserted island' language of choice. yet another dph

jerf 12y ago
I have to agree; if Perl didn't "win", then who did? Python? Very popular. Solid language. Probably at some point more adopted than Perl, but not so much so that I can say it "won", partially because of how this list goes on. Ruby? Same. PHP? Maybe in the web space but not in general. Javascript? Even in light of Node, this is still a marginal language out of the browser, especially considered over the past 15 years. Lua? No. Perl may not have "won" but it has hardly "lost", and now IMHO the sun is just beginning to set on this entire catagory of 1990s-style dynamic scripting language and there probably will be no further "winner" in this space.

jrochkind1 12y ago

The "Maintenance and greenfield concerns are very different" section is relevant to my interests: > The implications for a programming language are difficult to prove conclusively, but simple to explain: an ecosystem focused more on maintaining existing projects than creating new projects will be less attractive for new projects. Ruby/Rails provides an interesting example here. The ruby and rails community ecosystem (the author is right it's about "ecosystem" more than the language) -- has, in general, done it's best to focus as much as possible on innovation over stability. That is, has tried to choose focus on creating new projects over support for existing projects. Much to the frustration of some in the ruby ecosystem with existing projects to support. (Rails, of course, from one perspective is an existing project; from another is a framework, which has generally over it's history cared more about new projects that will be created with Rails than existing projects built on Rails that need to be supported). Of course, there still are existing projects, and there are still developers participating in the ecosystem who need to support those existing projects. So you can only go so far. What has this done for ruby/rails ecosystem? Hard to say. Overall it's been successful, but it still can't make the ecosystem as greenfield as a true greenfield ecosystem, which is perhaps why some are leaving ruby/rails for greener pastures -- more than any qualities of ruby as a language, it's just the opportunity to be in a greenfield ecosystem that is attractive, perhaps.

tudorconstantin 12y ago

[probably shameless plug] I first intended to write this as an answer, but I ended up with a complete blog post: http://programming.tudorconstantin.com/2015/01/perl-already-won.html http://programming.tudorconstantin.com/2015/01/perl-already-...

chromatic 12y ago
Watch out for whoever says that Perl is an ancient technology, because they're either ignorant and completely clueless about what's really happening in the world of computer programming, or they have hidden agendas. That's a strong statement. Are you quite sure those are the only two possibilities?
- tudorconstantin 12y ago
  There's this Perl book called Modern Perl. It is written to help others learn about the new technologies available to Perl world. Do you know about the book? oh, you wrote it :) So yeah, if they don't have hidden agendas and they say that writing Perl apps means writing apps in an old fashion, the only possible alternative is to be ignorant :)
  - chromatic 12y ago
    I think Perl didn't win. I don't know the specific context of Romania, but from where I sit, it's unlikely I'll get paid to program in it in the foreseeable future, if ever. What's my hidden agenda in agreeing with this article over yours?
    - tudorconstantin 12y ago
      The article has valid points. Hidden agenda is when people say that writing Perl is equivalent to using ancient technologies, solely because Perl had its popularity peak in the nineties - and this might also be a reason why you can't be paid for doing Perl - who would want legacy technologies in their stack? It's just that, well, it isn't legacy. It's more up to date and much more robust than many of the hip languages.

unlinguaf 12y ago

nothing to show for perl6? it's shipping in 2015.

jjn1056 12y ago

Not sure what 'winning is'... I've had a great career in Perl so far and every company I've worked at has been a startup using Perl (not old legacy code). So that's like almost 20 years and every year someone says, "Perl is dead", etc. And every year I just have a blast programming Perl. I've met a ton of great people and I enjoy contributing to open source. So I would say quite complaining about something you personally don't like and get on with doing something useful.

jjn1056 12y ago

and I want to add, I am so looking forward to having this exact conversation 5, 10 and 20 years from now...