Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

http://ostatic.com/blog/guest-post-why-perl-isnt-going-away-soon-or-ever

by fogus • 16 years ago

34 87 16 years ago

ostatic.com

eli• 16 years ago

...because it's holding the entire internet together?

plinkplonk5• 16 years ago

"because it's holding the entire internet together?"

Could someone explain what this means in some detail? I hear this all the time but I could never make any sense out of it. Sure once upon a time perl was the best way to get cgi scripts running and do some web programming. Other than this piece of history, any specific examples of the "holding the internet together" property perl is supposed to have? What part of critical internet infrastructure depends on perl?

I am no networking expert but it seems to me that a lot of the infrastructure (apache, tcp/ip stacks etc) is written in C. How (specifically) does perl hold the internet together any more than any other scripting language? Or is this jusr something perl aficionados tell each other ?

DrSprout4• 16 years ago

I think you just answered your own question. I'd say just about every Unix box on the planet has Perl holding it together somewhere in there. What you've asked is essentially like asking "How does mortar hold buildings together any more than bricks, steel I-beams, or roofing?"

These things are equally important, and yes you could probably find a substitute, but why?

huherto2• 16 years ago

Good question. I don't have a good answer, but my guess is that it refers to the cgi scripts that use to prevail before and also to all the scripts that every sys admins have written to make their job easier. At one point Perl was called "The duct tape of the internet", I guess referring to all the small scripts tying things together.

nailer2• 16 years ago

No technology ever goes away. Nobody is saying Perl won't be developed, just that people are less likely to use other languages for new projects in favor of newer technologies.

DrSprout4• 16 years ago

The article still makes an excellent point, which is that the difference between most of the 'newer technologies' and Perl is basically marketing, not any actual superiority of language design. You can write line noise in Perl, but you can also write Python in Perl. It may not be quite as pretty as Python, but as far as use in a production environment it will be equally useful.

jergosh5• 16 years ago

Why not just write Python in Python instead ;)?

ianb4• 16 years ago

I consider Perl's data structures to be genuinely inferior. Lists that cannot contain other lists are not reasonable in a high level language. Pointers are not reasonable in a high level language. Explicit function signatures are a superior language design.

silentium• 16 years ago

...because it is my duct tape

pstevensza• 16 years ago

...and it is my glue. So many things in my environment wouldn't happen to be able to talk to each other if it weren't for Perl.

T_S_2• 16 years ago

Did you perhaps mean perl 5.8?

btilly3• 16 years ago

No. It said Perl 5.12 because Perl 5.12 was released April 12 this year.

However that said, Perl cuts releases of old branches from time to time. So 5.8.9 was released a year after 5.10. See http://search.cpan.org/~jesse/perl-5.12.0/pod/perlhist.pod for a full release history.

T_S_2• 16 years ago

Thanks for the update. I stopped using perl around the same time 5.8 was slated to be the last version of perl 5, since perl 6 was coming Real Soon Now.

I learned perl in 1996 in order to cobble together a system that collected reports from all sorts of weird text files and formats (anyone remember Framemaker?) and merge them into one nice big postscript file with custom watermarks and page numbers. This program ran for at least 8 years after that. I had to learn perl in the dead of night because I had been instructed to find a "technology solution" and perl was "unsupportable".

Another totally different program was developed to prototype a large orchestration of securities valuation and hedging. It even had numerical optimization in it. It was taken wholesale into production.

Many other programs, some fairly long, were written in order to run successfully only once, and then they were retired.

I loved perl.

Then I learned python and could read the code that I wrote a few months ago and more importantly, read other peoples' code more easily. Consistent white space helps a lot. It had many of the same advantages of perl, with slightly clunkier regexes, plus a nice system for introspection. It could almost replace matlab--almost.

I built a complicated optimization system that orchestrated multiple processors and called C++ library code so I didn't have to learn C++.

I forgot about perl. I loved python now.

Then I learned haskell and forgot about python but that's enough for today.

davidw2• 16 years ago

Hah, what's funny is that Jeff Hobbs, the author of the article, is one of the main Tcl developers.

jgrahamc• 16 years ago

Except, that Jeff (who used to work for me at Scriptics) is a pragmatic kind of guy and is likely to not allow his allegiance to Tcl prevent him from seeing what else is going on out there.

davidw2• 16 years ago

I meant it in a "huh, that's funny" way, not that he's not perfectly capable of expressing intelligent opinions about Perl, Python or whatever else.

jergosh5• 16 years ago

The whole article fails to mention any advantage of Perl over the languages it's compared to (wonder why). The sooner Perl falls into obscurity, the better.

DrSprout4• 16 years ago

I currently code for my day job in a proprietary extension to a proprietary dialect of BASIC from the mid-80's. This language is legitimately broken, and has significant disadvantages at every turn. It has no real functions, no block-level scoping, lists are stored as delimited strings, there are no hashes, and nothing even resembling objects.

Perl has all of these things. If you're coding in Perl and you write bad code, it's your fault. If Perl has a fault, it's that it's easy to write code that you think is done, when you have more work to do if you want to develop a full-scale application. However, you can write incomplete but good-enough code in any language. (And I will always use Perl to write once-off scripts. It's perfect for that task.)

jergosh5• 16 years ago

It's all fine until you have to work with bad legacy code ;)

My last project at work was rewriting a 4k line monstrosity in Perl into 500 lines of Python which do exactly the same. I can't even blame the original authors (it was likely their first larger program), it's just that Perl makes it so easy to write horrible code.

viraptor3• 16 years ago

But that's because you already know perl. For new people... I don't see a reason to go there. Perl smells funny - there are better alternatives that don't require you to spend time learning (for example) what can be referenced, what cannot, when is \ not taking a reference, why I cannot have lists-inside-lists, and how is that different from arrays anyway, etc. And that's only one source of that funny smell... For beginners, there are loads of languages which offer consistent behaviour and once they learn that, perl will be the odd one you don't really want to touch.

So yes - some people will still write perl, but it will be an obscure language one day (hopefully).

flogic• 16 years ago

That's because Perl Python and Ruby offer essentially the same feature set. The only significant differences are syntax and CPAN.

berntb2• 16 years ago

Well, Perl arguably has a nicer OO system with Moose... :-)

ledger123• 16 years ago

"The answers are longevity, maturity, and a rich ecosystem of development tools and modules that developers can leverage for almost any programming task. Consider the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN). CPAN is an enormous collection of software and documentation, largely unmatched outside of the Perl community. Yes, other languages have similar repositories patterned after CPAN -- but thus far none have matched CPAN for its size and scope. CPAN continues to grow at a rapid clip."

jbellis• 16 years ago

Bet you didn't know there was a [relatively] new COBOL-2002, either.

(If I were snarky, I would note that the next COBOL spec after that -- yes, there is one -- might well be released before perl 6.)

geoffc2• 16 years ago

CPAN is the killer app for Perl. Every time I flip across to another language I usually love the syntax and structures but the lack of a CPAN equivalent is always grating and I usually end up right back at Perl to get stuff done fast.

garyrichardson• 16 years ago

I used to think this way. After living without CPAN for 3 years using different languages, I appreciate the lack of dependency additions my projects get.

The problem with CPAN is the same things as RPM hell or DLL hell, only worse and more fragile. On a large project, you really don't want to randomly upgrade your DBI module, or some other small perl package that may bring your whole project down. But then one day you need to use Net::SSH and it wants to upgrade DBI::Search for some bizarre reason, which requires you to compile a beta version of the GZIP library because it's using some new interface that's not included with your CentOS 5 install. Then you find out DBI::Search requires DBI 1.41 and you're only using 1.40. There's a backwards incompatible behavior that affects your code in 1.41, which is why you haven't upgraded yet. You go through all 100k lines of your project and make sure all the DBI code handles this new case.

Then you have to try and install the changes on all 75 of your servers. You may have some sort of capistrano script to make this simpler, or you may have used RPM versions of your CPAN packages. Neither solution is less painful than the other. CPAN wasn't really designed to work with your sysadmin's workflow, so neither solution is particularly useful.

At the end of the day, you would have spent less time just writing the damn code yourself to call out to the ssh binary.

geoffc2• 16 years ago

Agreed with the pain of admin with CPAN. I ended up creating a custom build and distribution tool to manage this as the existing solutions are weak.

staunch• 16 years ago

I blame your sysadmin for not making it easy. Even so, you probably don't rely on CPAN all that much if you lose more time to dependency problems than you save by re-using other people's code. That's not my experience at all. I save days and sometimes weeks at a time.

If you're running through 100K lines of code to test a DBI upgrade you're clearly not testing properly. Not that most CPAN modules break compatibility. It's very rare that something like a DBI upgrade will break anything. All the good module authors are very careful.

gamache8• 16 years ago

Article's conclusion: After a short lapse, Perl development is picking up and enthusiasm for Perl 5 is as strong as ever.

I would agree. A little over a decade ago, Perl suffered from the same problems which plagued JavaScript in its early days: ease of writing shitty code, mountains of shitty sample code, and a community which did not vehemently encourage the writing of unshitty code.

This caused a backlash which lasted several years, during which the programming public panned the languages almost universally.

But a funny thing happened; rather than shriveling up and going away, the languages and their practitioners matured. Community focus became less centered on glue code and scrolling effects, and attention was shifted to writing clean, maintainable code which uses the language's best features (metaprogramming, easy hash/object manipulation, etc) in manageable, modular ways.

Now both ecosystems are flourishing, and though Perl doesn't have quite the install base of JavaScript, it's still a viable contender to Ruby and Python in their areas of expertise, and it can be called the best tool for some of those jobs.

plinkplonk5• 16 years ago

"Perl development is picking up and enthusiasm for Perl 5 is as strong as ever."

I will take your word for it, but I do have to say (speaking as someone with a lot of grey in his hair) that I haven't seen a young developer choose to work primarily in perl (over ruby or Python or Java or C#) in ages. Most new projects/startups don't seem to choose perl as their primary language.

I readily concede that this is probably an artifact of my limited experience with perl. Just noting what I see, not looking for a flame war.

How many of YC companies use perl do you think?

gamache8• 16 years ago

You have a good point that Perl doesn't have great adoption with young'uns. I think we'd see more Perl usage if Ruby didn't exist; Ruby borrowed some of Perl's most attractive features and is rightly popular for it.

By the numbers, though, I still agree with the quoted statement. Perl development is picking up compared to the past few years, and enthusiasm for Perl 5 is the strongest it's been (at least since 5.0).

sreque2• 16 years ago

Older people use it is because they don't want to change or learn something new. Especially in a company already entrenched in Perl development, their is little benefit to switching to a better language compared to the cost of forcing people to learn a whole new technology stack when they are more than content with Perl. However, new companies are much more free to build on whatever technology stack is most appropriate.

I've also noticed over time that lots of non-CS majors can and do program in scripting languages because they are relatively easy to pick up and get things done with. These people are usually more aligned with an IT career in that scripting constitutes only a fraction of their job. If they happen to learn Perl and PHP first, then that is what they stick with.

These people may like to program, but it is not the favorite part of their job and they have other work activities they enjoy more. More importantly, they know little to nothing about software design principles and are not interested in improving their software development skills. They would rather spend their time learning about something else that interests them more. Therefore, they don't even know how to appreciate the advantages more modern scripting languages offer. To these people, languages like Perl are more than sufficient to get their job done, and they are probably right.

However, as people who know better, I believe we should be encouraging better languages in a friendly way whenever possible. When my IT friends ask me about any questions related to programming, I usually try to point them to Python or Ruby for a solution. If they are asking questions they are probably interested in learning something new!

edit: changed wording based on reply from gamache.

mock4• 16 years ago

You might just not be in the right echo chamber. In the last few years I've been in several startups where perl is the primary development language. Most of the people we hired were in their mid twenties to mid thirties, which seems about what you'd expect for startups. HN seems to be a hangout for lots of python (and lisp, and ruby) people, but less so for perl and php people. Obviously I do hang out in the right echo chambers, which is probably why my experience differs.

adam-_-• 16 years ago

I am a young developer working primarily in Perl.

Reasons? Friendly, knowledgable community. CPAN and Catalyst.

Admittedly I don't know any other [under]graduates using Perl (outside of bio/geology).

bobbyi2• 16 years ago

ease of writing shitty code, mountains of shitty sample code, and a community which did not vehemently encourage the writing of unshitty code. This caused a backlash which lasted several years, during which the programming public panned the languages almost universally.

That's not how I remember it. Perl usage started to really fall off when PHP became popular and replaced modperl/ cgi scripts as the common way of throwing together a dynamic webpage. PHP is a language famous for letting people write shitty code and having a "community" that doesn't discourage it.

gamache8• 16 years ago

Perl usage on the web began to fall off due in part to PHP, but you're neglecting the huge amount of Perl used in text processing, system administration, automation, even the sciences.

PHP is (very mildly) comparable to Perl's Mason template engine, if Mason were the only way to use Perl.

sabat• 16 years ago

enthusiasm for Perl 5 is as strong as ever

That's probably something of an overstatement, but I've written Perl in the past months for gigs, even though I have long abandoned it for Ruby. I don't know that I'd call the general interest in Perl5 "enthusiasm" -- that's a word I'd save for Ruby/RoR and maybe Python and DJ Ango. ;-p :-)

Perl5 is mature. There are modules for anything you can imagine, and most seem to be well-maintained. It's still useful, if someone antiquated in feel.

Perl6: that's another story. It's DOA. People will point to this implementation and that one, but the lack of a reference implementation, along with the long development time, makes Perl6 the Duke Nukem Forever of scripting.

huherto2• 16 years ago

Does any body remember when Larry Wall and others were rewriting all the Unix commands in Perl? I thought that was cool but I never heard of it again, and haven't been able to find references to it.

avar3• 16 years ago

You're probably talking about the long dead one-man project to rewrite all the /bin/* utilities in Perl. That had nothing to do with Larry Wall.

kree10• 16 years ago

It was Tom Christiansen, originally. Looks like no updates since 2004: http://search.cpan.org/dist/ppt/

Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

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