this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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65
Perl still relevant in 2023/24? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
73 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

hi, i was interested if perl is still relevant in this day and age. Perl has been on the decline for a very long time now. Perl 6 (now named 'raku) not being backwards compatible with perl 5 code made the already small perl community even smaller by splitting it in half. A good example is lisp with it's thousands of different dialects.

Is it still worth using or is it bound to legacy software forever? Like cobol.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Perl is nice. I doubt anybody uses it to create new projects though, and if they do I'd doubt their sanity. Learn it if you want to maintain old, illegible code.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

The illegible code claim has always baffled me.

You can write perfectly legible code in perl. You can write illegible code in python if you really want to.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sure you can, doesn't mean people do it. From my experience, they don't.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Define "people". People you work with? Old codebases from your workplace?

Well, from my experience, people don't write illegible perl code.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

You can write illegible code in any language.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The variable prefixes make it easy in Perl to write line noise, and there are much more "magical defaults".

What's the most illegible code you have found in Python?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

How is type information noise instead of a helpful feature?

I haven't looked for illegible Python code out there.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Writing legible Perl code is the complete antithesis of what the language was created for. This comment shows a complete misunderstanding of Larry Wall’s work.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lol what are you talking about?! What is this LW's point you're referring to? "Write non-readable code, everyone"?

I'm guessing you're referring to him saying "there's more than one way to do things", and that's not mutually exclusive from writing legible code.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

There’s an obfuscated C contest too - no one ever assumed that K&R opposed highly legible code. I seem to recall that Kerrigan actually wrote some books to the contrary.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

That's a non-argument, man. You just linked to a contest.

That's like saying that the FAA endorses unsafe airplane building practices because they hold a contest about unmanned cardboard made planes that fly the most length in a desert without crashing.