Ask HN: Is Perl dead?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1660360

by sendos • 16 years ago

54 134 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I've been noticing that Perl doesn't get mentioned that much anymore in articles, blog posts, HN threads, etc.

A current example is the "Who's hiring" thread which is now on HN: Most of the requirements are C/C++/Java/PHP/Python/Ruby, and almost none are for Perl.

However, this is not just about hiring. In almost anything I read, there is barely a mention of Perl anymore.

FYI, I use Perl extensively for text file parsing and processing, and I'm not familiar with Python or Ruby, but it seems that these two languages are "winning the war" against Perl (although I assume some of you may dispute that these two languages are even comparable to Perl, for a variety of reasons)

Is my general observation correct?

Will Perl 6 be able to turn things around, or is it too late?

buster• 16 years ago

I guess: yes.

The only place i see it is in some old scripts running at customers and they ALWAYS are a nightmare, unmaintainable, horrific, spaghetti code that oftern enough makes me want to poke my eyeballs out. Mostly, the customer agrees with me, but usually those scripts are too big to be replaced quickly... :/

kqueue2• 16 years ago

Learn Python and you'll notice why perl doesn't make sense.

sabat4• 16 years ago

Perl makes sense. It's a matter of degree of sense, and personal opinion. Python's use of semantic white space doesn't make any sense to me. But I know plenty of sane people who disagree with me.

Goladus5• 16 years ago

Python's "semantic whitespace" is syntax that gives meaning to a common pattern in code. Most code that way by convention anyway. If that pattern has meaning then curly braces can be used for something else (in python's case: dictionary literals).

Hope it makes more sense now, even if you don't prefer that style.

hippich• 16 years ago

python is like basic. basic on steroids, but still basic. perfect for people with 'straight' brain. just like you.

kqueue2• 16 years ago

You obviously don't know much about Python... and very little about programming.

chrisclark17292• 16 years ago

This is a question, but isn't it used fairly often in the finance industry?

xtho• 16 years ago

Are you suggesting that this could explain certain events in the past?

chrisclark17292• 16 years ago

As others stated for me, to parse large text files of data.

mgummelt• 16 years ago

Not if you include Asia. It's huge there, especially in Japan.

sabat4• 16 years ago

Bigger than Ruby? Really?

sigzero2• 16 years ago

That is hard to say. I would lean toward "yes" because Perl has had longer to ferment there. It is a hard call because Ruby "comes from" Japan, so it is hard to make a definitive statement on this question.

jwr• 16 years ago

It is a very useful tool that serves many needs.

It isn't "dead" anymore than the Norwegian language is "dead".

It might just not be your first choice for your next project.

davidw• 16 years ago

> It isn't "dead" anymore than the Norwegian language is "dead".

It's just pining for the fjords?

Kidding aside, it still does well here:

http://www.langpop.com/

Although if you put Ohloh and Freshmeat at 0, it does significantly worse.

telemachos3• 16 years ago

(Second try at this)

First, anyone who says that Python or Ruby is not even comparable to Perl is full of it or very mistaken. They are close enough that we quickly run into the narcissism of small differences [1].

Second, in my experience HN ranges from uninterested to hostile when it comes to Perl. I read lots about Perl, but many of the blogs or forums I frequent are Perl-centric. My point is simply that you shouldn't judge by "what you read" if what you read is a function of what you choose or who you follow.

Third, and most importantly, the Perl5 community doesn't seem anywhere near dead. Off the top of my head, I'm particularly happy with a slew of new tools for working with Perl and CPAN: cpanm[2], perlbrew[3], cpan-outdated[4], pmuninstall[5], cpansearch [6] (written in C, but obviously made for the Perl community). There's also Plack[7] for modern Perl webapps. Finally, consider the whole Modern Perl[8] movement.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences

[2] http://github.com/miyagawa/cpanminus

[3] http://github.com/gugod/App-perlbrew

[4] http://github.com/tokuhirom/cpan-outdated

[5] http://github.com/xaicron/pm-uninstall

[6] http://github.com/c9s/cpansearch

[7] http://plackperl.org/

[8] http://github.com/chromatic/modern_perl_book

wildjim• 16 years ago

For a while, maybe 5+ years ago (7? I can't remember clearly) it seemed like Perl was stagnating a little. This was about the time Ruby really seemed to take off, and some neat Python projects appeared (e.g. Gentoo Linux).

Now, even though the core language hasn't changed, there seem to be all sorts of clever Perl modules appearing which take advantage of a lot of Perl's highly flexible nature.

I really like Ruby myself, and really hate Python (even though I have to use it at work) but when the other languages fail me, I can almost always turn to Perl in a pinch and get it to do what I want. I also have to admit that the potential power of Perl6's syntax is a little astonishing; I think I would pick Perl6 over Ruby, for example.

jacquesm• 16 years ago

> really hate Python

Why?

someone_here3• 16 years ago

I love perl, and I don't want to see it be dead, but there aren't enough libraries relating to my interests (games).

rtward• 16 years ago

You should really check out the SDL bindings for Perl. It's getting to the point where the dev versions are almost comparable to PyGame. There's some really cool stuff going on.

someone_here3• 16 years ago

I had checked them out about a year ago and they couldn't even draw a line on the screen :\

phaylon6• 16 years ago

There's the Ogre bindings, but they are unfortunately incomplete. I think the problem here is that of critical mass. For real nice game development, you don't simply want OpenGL or even an engine like Ogre. You want to extend the engine to include physics and collision detection.

So, there would need to be either a large enough crowd able to maintain the bindings for the engines and their extensions, or we need a more generic approach to C++ foreign library access. Since there are people working on better C and C++ FFI's,

I'm hoping for the latter. But that's probably mostly because I'm no good at C++, and such a layer would be my only way to use external libraries without available bindings.

jwecker• 16 years ago

Hmm... define dead? I see a lot of cool programming concepts and computer science coming together in Perl 6- too much for me to know how to use it effectively or rationally. To me Perl is going from terse parsing and glue language to something more like Haskell- I don't think of Haskell as dead just because it's not used as a quick scripting language- I assume Haskell will keep creating cutting edge stuff that eventually filters down into "lesser" languages.

Now, on the other hand, if I had actually taken the time to become a Perl monk, and good grasp enough of the awesome stuff coming down the line and know exactly how it would fit into real-world problems- Perl wouldn't even be close to dead to me. I'm sure there are a lot of people out there that are in that group. I'm jealous but not quite enough to actually try to get up to speed on it.

If it's not dead to you then I would recommend having no hesitations using it. It'll certainly be supported, and libraries... I mean, I don't know of anything that comes close to touching CPAN yet (dunno how Perl 6 fits in there). For me, though, it's dead as an alternative unless I see something amazingly compelling that I can't get elsewhere without similar learning investment.

phuff• 16 years ago

I think there's still a vibrant perl community out there, but I wouldn't say the perl community is growing. I don't know that I'd use dead or alive but maybe "plateaued".

jlees5• 16 years ago

FYI, I use Perl extensively for text file parsing and processing

Yeah, me too, but that's the issue. It's great at that. Great at quick and dirty command line hacks. Hell, most of my PhD code was written in Perl. (Something I take a perverse satisfaction in.)

But it's not great for rapid webapp development, it's probably harder to hire people, there are fewer libraries and interfaces and open source toolkits, etc - so people like me moved from Perl to Python (it's a really easy jump).

I still use my old perl scripts now and again, but even for quick and dirty stuff I tend to use Python - just in case I want to come back to it later and have a chance of understanding what the hell I wrote. :)

(Aside: One of my summer internships was on the web backend team at my university's Engineering lab. We wrote an object oriented student class administration system, in Perl. It was quite probably the most hideous piece of software engineering I've ever seen...)

berntb8• 16 years ago

>>But it's not great for rapid webapp development

Interesting, do you know what you talk about and have references?

AFAIK, there are some quite neat libraries and a better OO system than the usual competition (Ruby, Python, Java et al). Etc.

jlees5• 16 years ago

Observe the vague handwavy terms I used: I'm about 18 months out of date as I made the switch to Python around the start of 09.

At the time, Catalyst was very unfriendly (a quick google - it still is) and nowhere near as rapid-accessible as Django, just because of the amount of head-twisting you have to do to get things up and running. It may have changed, but frankly I have little interest in investigating it, and I expect most other people who drifted away from Perl are in a similar boat.

Also, having developed an OO backend for a site running in Perl, I never wish to do so again. Your definition of 'better OO system' clearly differs from mine.

joe_the_user• 16 years ago

  Post: "I've done a bit of X and my overall impression of Y in  was..." 
  Reply: "References, sources, double blind studies please! Prove you know what you're talking about..."

It seems like asking for references has become a far too easy way to pull karma points, even against posts which make their sources fairly clear.

leif5• 16 years ago

> from Perl to Python (it's a really easy jump)

I disagree. Python is incredibly restrictive when you're used to perl. I would be so frustrated if I went that direction.

Goladus5• 16 years ago

Just curious, what ways you found python restrictive?

lincolnq• 16 years ago

Odd. Around 2004, I switched from Perl to Python for all the same tasks, and I barely noticed: it was a matter of weeks before I was just as fluent in Python as I had been in Perl. What's your experience been like?

jlees5• 16 years ago

Yeah, there are times when it's easy to be frustrated at the roundabout way you have to do certain things in Python compared to Perl; I also found the latter to be true on other occasions so it's swings and roundabouts.

My side point was really just that if you know Perl, you don't have to do much to learn Python. Another commenter in this thread says Ruby's easy to a Perl-head, but I didn't find that to be the case personally.

rcfox3• 16 years ago

> there are fewer libraries and interfaces and open source toolkits, etc

Um... What? According to http://search.cpan.org/, there are 85193 community-contributed modules. Okay, some of that is stupid stuff (http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Acme::Meow) but they don't make up a large percentage. Compare that to PyPI's 11199 packages and RubyGems' 15674 gems.

pragmatic• 16 years ago

Yes, but do they _work_? That's why I became disillusioned with Perl, even though it was heavily used at my last company. I got the "oh, yeah, just go to CPAN and grab the module." I usually ended up using Java (how perverse is that?). I now prefer Python and C# because I find more stuff that works (but still plenty of broken old stuff).

lsc• 16 years ago

amongst webapp developers, yeah. But amongst SysAdmins? Python still has a long ways to go before it reaches the stability of perl, though it's gaining. Also, CPAN is awesome. I don't know of another language that has a cpan-like tool that measures up to CPAN.

SysAdmins are slow to discard a good tool; hell, some of us still use bash. Perl 5 has been dominant for most of my career in this arena, and things will be quite slow to change.

I do see that Python is beginning to replace perl in the places where perl5 replaced bash in the earliest parts of my career... I remember back in the late '90s it was common to maintain two versions of perl on a system. Now, perl5 is stable... you almost never need more than one version of it, but I see systems (especially RHEL systems) with more than one version of python (sometimes more than two. Gah!)

telemachos3• 16 years ago

hell, some of us still use bash

As opposed to what? (Do all the cool kids now use zsh? That's my best guess.) Bash just had a major release, as well as a point-upgrade to that. How is Bash now a poster child for out-of-date good tools that people won't let go of?

astine• 16 years ago

As opposed to Perl for tasks that would be much easier with Perl scripts than with shell scripts. I know SysAdmins who do this. Perl won't be replaced as A SysAmin language of choice for while now, I don't think.

_cbsz• 16 years ago

I suspect that the grandparent meant "write shell scripts".

Goladus5• 16 years ago

Funny, I find Python to be more stable than Perl, the one that needs multiple versions on the same system, and the one with modules that fail to compile without tweaking compiler flags.

zepolen• 16 years ago

I love Python and it's my first choice for most projects, but to say that there isn't a problem with lib versioning in Python is just plain ignorant.

mx12• 16 years ago

I would say that it is absolutely not, at least in my experience. In my lab, which is a bioinformatics lab, perl is still being used heavily. Perl is a great tool for dealing with text files, and little pieces of code that you need to do something quick.

acqq• 16 years ago

I also use Perl (5 of course) for text processing but also for some binary file modifications. Just for playing with algorithms I use Python. I still wouldn't like to have to use the "wrong" of them for the given purpose.

Personally I don't expect Perl 6 to have a noticeable impact soon, I've read about it and I've never thought "that's what I've been missing all the time."

Let me tell you what I'm really missing -- something even simpler than Python which would allow me to draw the random graphical things with basic interactive possibilities but with the ease of old Basic languages. I've used tkinter a few times but every time I have to make something new I just discover I've forgot all the illogical things I had to do the last time, and the old source is not of much help, I know I'll have to spend trying a lot just to make something simple, so I lose the will to even start again...

philwelch7• 16 years ago

Perl 5 is mature, and Perl 6 is pre-release, but they're different languages with the same name for branding purposes.

Perl 6 is a really promising language with tons of cool features, and some similarities to Perl 5. It will pick up hype when it's 100% finalized, even though you can use it now.

Perl 5 (popularly known as "Perl") is old enough to be on the other side of "cool", but it's a perfectly good language, especially if you use CPAN.

rcfox3• 16 years ago

Perl 5 came out in 1994, Ruby came out in 1995, Python came out in 1991. (Sources: Wikipedia)

philwelch7• 16 years ago

Perls 1-4 are even older (Perl 1 was 1987). Perl 5 really is just another version number of Perl, not a new language entirely like Perl 6.

Oftentimes what matters is exposure more than when something was invented. Erlang and Haskell came out in 1986 and 1990, respectively, but they're newer to most people than Perl is. Ruby and Python didn't have the exposure in 1995 and 1991 that Perl had.

(Interesting thought experiment--are there any obscure programming langauges today that will be all the rage in 2020, or has the internet accelerated that process?)

chromatic9• 16 years ago

> Perl 6 is pre-release...

Rakudo Perl 6 has had 34 releases.

> It will pick up hype when it's 100% finalized....

That must be Perl 5's marketing problem then, because it's not finalized either.

philwelch7• 16 years ago

Wikipedia: As of 2009, multiple Perl 6 implementations are under development, but none are considered "complete". As noted in the history section the language design itself is still subject to change. No implementation will be designated as the official Perl 6 implementation; rather, "Perl 6 is anything that passes the official test suite."[12]

If that's changed, you should probably go update that. "Pre-release" is generally understood as a synonym for "not complete", right? There's no complete, finished implementation of the Perl 6 spec, right? Is the spec itself finished?

It's like you can't say anything about Perl (either one) on Hacker News, not even mildly complimentary things, without someone jumping on perceived slights.

sabat4• 16 years ago

In summary: not dead yet because of all the legacy code and because of the "Modern Perl" movement.

However: many of us believe that Perl's day has come and gone and that truly modern languages like Ruby and Python have supplanted it. Absolutely true for me; I never use Perl when I can use Ruby -- not because of political reasons, but because Ruby is more elegant, readable, and concise.

As always, YMMV.

chromatic9• 16 years ago

> ... truly modern languages like Ruby and Python have supplanted it.

In what ways?

Certainly not in testing culture, nor available libraries, nor the power of features such as language extensions or object systems, nor in flexibility.

Screencasts, perhaps?

Estragon• 16 years ago

...its total lack of movement is due to it bein' tired and shagged out following a prolonged squawk.

...actually, it's probably pining for the fjords.

  http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~ebarnes/python/dead-parrot.htm

kgroll• 16 years ago

I'm surprised nobody has provided this link yet.

Perl is Dead. Long Live Perl. http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/08/perl_is_dead_l...

It's an essay from 2007, but I think it's still relevant today.

phaylon6• 16 years ago

No, it isn't dead by a long shot. We're just busy doing stuff. Core development (including the release frequency) has been more active than it has been in years. Most of the new developments happen around things like Catalyst and Mojo (Web Frameworks), Moose (OO and Meta-OO), Plack (Web Application Deployments), KiokuDB (Object-Graph storage), syntax extensions, Dist-Zilla (release management) and others. The testing and documentation "movements" are still strong and getting stronger. The toolchain is still being improved (telemachos named a few good examples). If you want to take a look at what the community is doing, I'd suggest reading the IronMan planet at http://ironman.enlightenedperl.org/

strlen• 16 years ago

There aren't many people using Perl for web applications, but there's lot of other (and in my opinion, more rewarding) work being done in it: email security, bio-informatics, "devops" (infrastructure as code) tooling. In addition, from what I know, Amazon still uses it extensively. Generally, however, these jobs (e.g., my last one in an email security company) usually combine Perl and C/C++ rather than being purely in Perl.

That being said, Ruby is close enough to Perl to where it would not be difficult for you to pick it up and in all likelihood you'll actually enjoy it (especially if you're been writing clean, object oriented Perl). If there's a Ruby-based job that interests you, go for it.

I personally, "moved on" (for non-trivial personal projects) onto Scala and OCaml: I actually like static typing (when there's type inference to reduce verbosity) and the mixed paradigms and "terse syntax" in these languages appeal to my Perl hacker DNA. The fact they're also blazingly fast means I don't have to "go down" to C++ (really, not all that hard in Perl with XS): the scalability of these languages (being suitable to whole variety of tasks, from simple scripts, to full systems) also appeals to me.

cageface• 16 years ago

I'm headed this way myself. For anything more complicated than a toss-off script I start with Scala now.

perigrin4• 16 years ago

My experience is nearly the opposite, Modern Perl for me is a wonderful language to write web applications in. Nearly everybody I speak with regularly is developing some web based application in Perl. Then again thats what I do for a living so my glasses are definitely rose tinted.

Sites like the BBC iPlayer system, and Omni Hotel's booking application are large public examples of Perl applications, Magazines.com is another. At the smaller end of the fence I worked on ParkingMobility.com, a REST system written in Perl with multi-platform clients (including iPhone), was written using Catalyst and the KiokuDB Object Persistence engine.

You have moved on, but so has Perl. Moose for example has had heavy influences from OCaml, Scala, CLOS, Smalltalk, and others. It provides anywhere from "some" (Moose has Type Constraints but not inferencing for example) to much if not more (Moose's implementation of Traits can provide state unlike Scala's from what I know) of the features of other languages.

The rivalry between Perl5 and Perl6 means that more and more of these features will be expressed. For example, I've seen some proof of concept code for implementing Moose's type system at the core language level (my Int $i = 'One'; # boom!). With a properly motivated hacker and the right direction this could turn into an excellent dynamic type system, or even a semi-static system similar to the one Perl6 is implementing. Having this kind of a type system makes lot of Web programming tasks much simpler to implement (and eliminates a whole range of security holes).

The current momentum in the community has me very excited for the future of Perl.

berntb8• 16 years ago

If this really isn't trolling, check jobs.perl.org instead.

As others have written, Python and Ruby fill the same niches and have about the same features.

zephyrfalcon• 16 years ago

For what it's worth, a quick search on dice.com gives the following:

  - perl: 4448 results
  - python: 1988
  - ruby: 1087

So I don't know... apparently there are still many jobs out there that require Perl. It may be that people use it less for new projects, though.

nprincigalli• 16 years ago

Here's a graph with postings for jobs.perl.org from jan/2002 to aug/2010:

http://bit.ly/bFuh7x

(source http://jobs.perl.org/about/stats)

pchristensen2• 16 years ago

Look like Rails took a big bite out of Perl jobs?

tomjen3• 16 years ago

I don't think Perl is dead, as computer languages are significantly harder to kill than zombies. I would not at all be surprised if some critical infrastructure that must run lets a bunch of people gets killed is written in PDP 9 assembler. Just seams to be the nature of the beast.

nhashem• 16 years ago

My thoughts... coming from someone who has been working with Perl for basically a decade at various companies, and have had the pleasure of working with Perl experts like Tim Bunce (author of DBI) and Randall Schwartz (author of various Perl books, including the camel book).

a) Perl was used for EVERYTHING web-related in the early 2000s, but other languages and tools have come around to supplant it.

Several commenters have already said, "oh man I had to deal with this legacy perl code and it was awful," and yeah, that's a common experience and makes them think, "Perl is a terrible legacy language, I can't wait to trash it on my Ruby mailing list tonight." The negativity propagates and then people like you wonder, "is Perl dead?"

b) Web frameworks are one of those tools where frameworks like Rails and Django have all the hype. If you want to whip up your startup idea into a minimum viable web application, the trendy choice is Rails or Django. I've used Perl web frameworks like Catalyst and I'll be the first to admit banging out your "It's like Facebook... But For Cats!" startup idea is a lot faster in Rails or Django.

c) As Steve Yegge said in one of his blog posts:

'As I've done for a great many other programming languages, I've bashed on Perl's technical weaknesses at length in the past. To my continued amazement, the Perl folks are the only ones who never get upset. They just say "Haha, yeah, boy, you're right, it sure is ugly. Heh. Yeah, so, um, anyway, I'm going to get back to work now..." It's awesome. I've gained so much respect for them. It's almost enough to make me go back to programming in Perl.'

In my experience (which of course is just as anecdotal at Steve's), this is very true. Zed Shaw writes yet another blog post blasting whatever technology crawled up his ass and died, and we just smirk and update our modules on CPAN. But while that means we're not getting caught up in the "narcissism of small differences" (to refer to an earlier commenter), it also means we're not part of the noise on the web. There will probably never be a "Perl is a Ghetto" blog post written, and while that's obviously a good thing, it can also lead to the perception that, "man, nobody's talking about Perl, nobody's even bashing Perl, is it dead?"

d) That said, in my opinion these languages don't hold a candle to Perl when it comes to back-end engineering. We love talking about startups here at HN and thus, we talk a lot about startup problems and their solutions. But if your startup actually grows into a real company, you're going to encounter problems like, "we need a system to allow our analysts to manage our SEM campaigns and reconcile our cost and revenue" or "this partner doesn't have an API so we need to spider their interface to get the daily data and import it into our data warehouse." And any company that dismisses Perl as an option for those problems just because of (a) (b) and (c) is doing their company a disservice.

TL;DR -- Perl's strengths don't match the trendy topics on communities like HN, but it still has real value for real business problems.

leif5• 16 years ago

No. I wrote the bulk of my intern project this summer in perl.

joeyh• 16 years ago

If perl is dead, could you please stop having threads about whether it's dead every month? TIA.

michaelaiello• 16 years ago

I'm currently writing a web application with perl catalyst...

sigzero2• 16 years ago

Read the following and stop asking:

http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/index.html

marilyn• 16 years ago

The Perl jobs mailing list frequently has a dozen or more jobs internationally a week. I'd say no, Perl is far from dead, despite it not having the sexy factor it once did.

zandorg• 16 years ago

I'd much rather search/replace a huge string in Perl than in C++. Perl's hugely optimised.

jamespitts• 16 years ago

"Dead perl" reminds me of when Bill Clinton said "you just don't get it" to Bush 41. Essentially meaningless, yet devastatingly true.

So, some interesting tidbits to add to this "conversation":

1. Perl developers are older (on average) than those of other trendier languages. They were there at the dawn of the web. They are more experienced. They are also less expensive. But who wants to be an old-timer who gets paid less?

2. There is a negative feedback situ between developers choosing what technology to learn based on what companies are running on, and companies choosing a technology to run on based on what developers are learning. This sort of tragic loop is a social cancer which takes leadership and risk to overcome.

3. CPAN completely kills the competition. It might have something to do with perl, but it doesn't matter. This thing is outstanding, one of the 5 best things in software engineering... period. If you don't get this, you are deluding yourself and need to take a closer look at it.

4. Perl6 is going to blow the doors off the hinges because it is even more hacker-friendly than perl5 (which is ludicrously hackable).

5. Perl is dead to you.

sunkencity• 16 years ago

Perl was the first programming language that I really liked using. Before perl i had programmed in basic and pascal and that wasn't very fun.

One of the best aspects of perl is the rock solid runtime, they have really gotten that right. Many of the newer languages like java, python & ruby have VMs that turn belly up after a varying amount of time, but perl just keeps running.

I prefer coding in ruby or clojure and I don't really like the object orientation syntax in perl. I'm looking forward to try out perl6.

phaylon6• 16 years ago

You might like Moose (http://search.cpan.org/dist/Moose/lib/Moose.pm). It's built on top of--and is compatible with--plain Perl OO, but provides a whole lot more and has grown a nice, big community. There's more information (presentations, articles and stuff) on http://moose.perl.org/

loumf• 16 years ago

Duck Duck Go has a lot of perl in it, and it's a somewhat trendy discussion topic on HN.

I think most of the reason we don't care is because DDG's strengths have nothing to do with Perl -- except for maybe how easy it is to deploy/keep running and regular expressions.

lelele4• 16 years ago

The bad news is that Perl isn't dead for sure. Languages tend to stick around for a while.

For myself, I regret all the time I've spent learning and using it. Perl and C++ are languages for those who don't know better. I know because I've used both extensively. Powerful text handling facilities? Perl? You are kidding: Emacs Lisp burns it with a blow.

Now down-vote me like ants gone mad. If you have less than ten years of experience "struggling" with code, and you haven't learned a bunch of languages beyond mainstream ones, then you just can't understand.

> A current example is the "Who's hiring" thread which is now on HN: Most of the requirements are C/C++/Java/PHP/Python/Ruby, and almost none are for Perl.

C/C++/Java/PHP/Python/Ruby? Really? I was expecting HNers to be a little more innovative.

phaylon6• 16 years ago

> I was expecting HNers to be a little more innovative.

I was expecting them to be less insulting, but you still get upvoted.

mikeklaas2• 16 years ago

I agree with you about Perl, but what language do you use to replace C++, as someone who knows better? I haven't quite found anything that can replace it.

lelele4• 16 years ago

I'm sorry to say I should have written: "Perl and C++ are good languages to those who don't know better ones" instead. I've been able to dump Perl, but I'm currently stuck with C++ too (as an employee). Why do you think you can't replace it? What are you using C++ for?

shadowfox• 16 years ago

> C/C++/Java/PHP/Python/Ruby? Really? I was expecting HNers to be a little more innovative

Care to explain?

lelele4• 16 years ago

Sorry. I should have deleted Python, Ruby - and maybe PHP for close to the metal web programming - after having copied the line. Regarding C/C++/Java, I was expecting HNers to prefer more agile languages and/or exploiting some other language's features to gain a competitive advantage.

kmg• 16 years ago

As strlen already mentioned perl is big in the e-mail and infrastructure world. I write perl code for our e-mail filter and/or infrastructure frequently. But our webui is developed is developed in rails and qooxdoo. So I guess, it boils down to right tool for the job and trends of the day.

ajdecon• 16 years ago

Most of my friends in bioinformatics still use Perl extensively, and it's the primary language in a couple of QA groups I know people in. I don't know that it'll ever be "hot" again, but it's certainly still a production language.

joeld42• 16 years ago

Short answer: Yes.

adw• 16 years ago

There are some big and new projects in Perl out there (BBC iPlayer for one – which is an enormously high-traffic site).

The real issue is that a language dies when new people stop learning it. Python's the language-du-jour of programming education (and has a strong position in science as a Matlab replacement, thanks to Numpy), Ruby's got Rails to give it momentum, PHP has Wordpress and Drupal as gateway drugs, Clojure and Scala are the JVM's great hopes, F# is the CLR's, and C#, Java and C++ will give you access to a lot of jobs.

Where are the new Perl programmers – in bulk – going to come from?

chromatic9• 16 years ago

> Where are the new Perl programmers – in bulk – going to come from?

The world of non-programmers, same as always.

thumper• 16 years ago

Language is a tool. Certainly, some people will create literature and others are merely hacks. Some languages will be conceptually cleaner, some more pure, and some an amalgam of expressions "borrowed" from other languages.

No, Virginia, Perl is not dead. Not as long as there is more than one way to do it, or a hacker trying to finish something that was due yesterday.

Perl, as we know it, might pass from this earth. But the spirit it embodied, that first we should use duct tape to build on the work of others then write glue to make it stick, that getting-things-done was the primary goal --- this is too close to the core of our restless selves. A thousand years from now, there will be some startup somewhere with an urgent need and a hacker that strokes his chin and says, "I think I could write that in Perl[1]..."

[1] replace "perl" with your favorite language. Pick the right tool for the job. Sometimes means "the tool you are most familiar with", but that says more about you than about the language.

expeditious• 16 years ago

> Will Perl 6 be able to turn things around, or is it too late?

Community plays a large role here, I think.

The Perl community (both 5 and 6) overall has a practical can-do attitude. This attracts users.

Perl 5 seems to have more grumpy (though still helpful) users.

Perl 6 has Larry and lots of courteous, friendly, and helpful users. It's a community you want to be a part of.

The Python community has a "no, you're wrong -- that's not Pythonic" feel to it which I think turns a lot of users off to Python.

So, I think Perl 6 does have a chance. Personally, I'd probably be more on-board with Perl 6 if it didn't look so darn complex.

c00p3r• 16 years ago

The most widely used spam filter was written in Perl - http://spamassassin.apache.org/

Spend a couple of minutes thinking about why on in Java or C++ (the answer is - tons of modules it uses).

Now try harder question - why not in Ruby or Python? ^_^

The world is the way it is, because it got that way. ^_^

_prototype_• 16 years ago

Isn't duckduckgo written in Perl? Thats one huge application right there.

scrottie• 16 years ago

I blogged about this on my use.perl.org/~scrottie blog. Perl's supply lines have been cut: grade school language courses don't teach it; those teach Flash, Squeak, and other things. High-school age hackers go for things like PyGame. College classes teach Java or Microsoft technologies, depending on who they're getting money from (sadly). Only a couple of Universities still teach Scheme as part of SICP. Self-taught Web programmers go the low road of PHP or Ruby for the high road. There are companies that use Perl but the work tends to be maintenance (which no one wants to do) or else they hire small, crack teams of experienced Perl programmers, not bothering with trying to invest in novice or intermediate programmers.

Perl launched to fame by being able to talk to a bunch of databases and being easily (for the time) bindable to binary libraries, as well as having great low level access to the OS, as well as being a direct upgrade path for sed, awk, bash, csh and so on. Now people don't care about upgrading old shell scripts and don't understand awk's idioms, sadly -- everyone wants yet another C, and every other language talks to the various databases and binds to C libraries just as well plus have better toolkits for creating games.

Perl 5 is dead in the sense that COBOL is dead: all of the work is maintenance work; there are no entry level or intermediate positions; experts can still find work and will be able to for a long time.

Perl 6 does lots of great stuff but that alone isn't enough. Without a PyGame, Rack, and lots of other pieces, it's just a neat language design. Whether Perl 6 kicks ass very much still depends on where people take it. In a very real sense, Perl 6's success depends on me. I need to port Continuity to it (and its native coroutines!). I need to take more features from Seaside and show them off. I need to play with SDL stuff and make good abstractions. Busy, busy, busy!

-scott

Ask HN: Is Perl dead?

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