Perl is still a great choice

Published by Paul at 2022-05-27, last updated at 2022-12-10 Comic source: XKCD

Published by Paul at 2022-05-27, last updated at 2022-12-10, Comic source: XKCD

Perl (the Practical Extraction and Report Language) is a battle-tested, mature, multi-paradigm dynamic programming language. Note that it's not called PERL, neither P.E.R.L. nor Pearl. "Perl" is the name of the language and perl the name of the interpreter or the interpreter command.

Unfortunately (it makes me sad), Perl's popularity has been declining over the last years as Google trends shows:

So it means that Perl and Raku now exist in parallel. They influence each other, but are different programming languages now. So why not just all use Raku instead of Perl? There are still a couple of reasons of why to choose Perl over Raku:

Many programmers already know Perl and many scripts are already written in Perl. It's possible to call Perl code from Raku (either inline or as a library) and it is also possible to auto-convert Perl code into Raku code, but that's either a workaround or involves some kind of additional work.

Perl 5 comes with a great backwards compatibility. Perl scripts from 5.000 will generally still work on a recent version of Perl. New features usually have to be enabled via a so-called "use pragmas". For example, in order to enable sub signatures, "use signatures;" has to be specified.

Perl is pre-installed almost everywhere. Fancy running a quick one-off script? In almost all cases, there's no need to install Perl first - it's already there on almost any Linux or *BSD or Unix or other Unix like operating system!

Perl has been ported to "zillions" of platforms. One day I found myself on a VMS box. Perl doesn't come installed by default on VMS, but the admin installed Perl there already. The whole operating system was very strange to me, but I was able to write "shell scripts" in Perl and became productive pretty quickly on VMS without knowing almost anything about VMS :-).

Perl is reliable. It has been proven itself "millions" of times, over and over again. Large enterprises, such as booking.com, heavily rely on Perl. Did you know that the package manager of the OpenBSD operating system is programmed in Perl, too?

diff --git a/gemfeed/atom.xml b/gemfeed/atom.xml index 80ce7de9..df0810bb 100644 --- a/gemfeed/atom.xml +++ b/gemfeed/atom.xml @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ - 2022-12-10T13:06:19+02:00 + 2022-12-10T13:15:56+02:00 foo.zone feed To be in the .zone! @@ -1455,8 +1455,12 @@ v = 008 [v = p*c*(s != c ? 2 : 1)] Total logical CPUs

Perl (the Practical Extraction and Report Language) is a battle-tested, mature, multi-paradigm dynamic programming language. Note that it's not called PERL, neither P.E.R.L. nor Pearl. 'Perl' is the name of the language and 'perl' the name of the interpreter or the interpreter command.. .....to read on please visit my site.

Perl is still a great choice

Published by Paul at 2022-05-27, last updated at 2022-12-10 Comic source: XKCD

+ 1c1 +< -rw-r--r--. 1 paul paul 16466 Dec 10 13:03 ../foo.zone-content/gemtext/gemfeed/2022-05-27-perl-is-still-a-great-choice.html +--- +> -rw-r--r--. 1 paul paul 16467 Dec 10 13:15 ../foo.zone-content/gemtext/gemfeed/2022-05-27-perl-is-still-a-great-choice.html +

Perl is still a great choice

Published by Paul at 2022-05-27, last updated at 2022-12-10, Comic source: XKCD

Unfortunately (it makes me sad), Perl's popularity has been declining over the last years as Google trends shows:

@@ -1491,7 +1495,7 @@ v = 008 [v = p*c*(s != c ? 2 : 1)] Total logical CPUs

Many programmers already know Perl and many scripts are already written in Perl. It's possible to call Perl code from Raku (either inline or as a library) and it is also possible to auto-convert Perl code into Raku code, but that's either a workaround or involves some kind of additional work.
Perl 5 comes with a great backwards compatibility. Perl scripts from 5.000 will generally still work on a recent version of Perl. New features usually have to be enabled via a so-called "use pragmas". For example, in order to enable sub signatures, "use signatures;" has to be specified.
Perl 5 comes with a great backwards compatibility. Perl scripts from 5.000 will generally still work on a recent version of Perl. New features usually have to be enabled via a so-called "use pragmas". For example, in order to enable sub signatures, use signatures; has to be specified.
Perl is pre-installed almost everywhere. Fancy running a quick one-off script? In almost all cases, there's no need to install Perl first - it's already there on almost any Linux or *BSD or Unix or other Unix like operating system!
Perl has been ported to "zillions" of platforms. One day I found myself on a VMS box. Perl doesn't come installed by default on VMS, but the admin installed Perl there already. The whole operating system was very strange to me, but I was able to write "shell scripts" in Perl and became productive pretty quickly on VMS without knowing almost anything about VMS :-).
Perl is reliable. It has been proven itself "millions" of times, over and over again. Large enterprises, such as booking.com, heavily rely on Perl. Did you know that the package manager of the OpenBSD operating system is programmed in Perl, too?