On Tue, Dec 31, 2019 at 4:30 PM Marc Chantreux <marc.chantr...@renater.fr> wrote: > > On Tue, Dec 31, 2019 at 06:57:02AM -0600, Daniel Boyd wrote: > > As one of the few remaining people out there who considers perl to be > > their favorite language—starting to wonder if it’s just me and Larry > > Wall at this point—I’d like to say that perl should stay in base on > > its merits, all the perl-based system tools notwithstanding. > > one of the few remaining people ? is it so ? i really wonder ... > > Perl bashing is around the IT crowd for 20 decades and yet, when i > compare with other dynamic langages: > > * perl is the only one who gives me the conciseness and spirit of unix > tools combined to the power of a dynamic langage (the only close one > is ruby, the next level is raku, the others look like jokes to me). > so as openbsd people seems to be confortable with this unix culture, > i'm inclined to think that perl is popular here. > * CPAN is the best ecosystem to share code (metacpan is just awesome > compared to the other package sites, tooling is very good as well) > * the popularity of perl around me don't reflect the "perl is dead" moto > we heard since so many years (yes: there is a decline but it's in > flavor of compiled langages. the only one who switched to python > made this choice for money reason) > > both perl and openbsd popularities are underestimated just because > they still prefer mailing lists over stackoverflow (or other web > services who try to buzz with some charts) and don't care that much > about marketing. but still: i will be curious to know the perl > popularity in the openbsd community.
Don't know if anyone cares because I'm not an OpenBSD dev (maybe some day I'll find something useful to hack on), but perl is definitely my go-to language. I agree with the "conciseness and spirit of unix tools", it is something that I have thought about but have never been able to formulate. Of course its age is showing in some areas but in my experience, those things are actually still worked on, and have been fixed without major incompatibilities (python3 anyone?). I remember a few years ago when I was briefly researching a replacement for perl for my personal projects and I tried out python3 and ruby in parallel and ruby was definitely the winner there. I have absolutely no idea why python even gained the popularity it has, it felt like a random hack, especially compared to ruby. The only thing I really miss from python is "yield".
