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.
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.
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.
Sure you can, doesn’t mean people do it. From my experience, they don’t.
Define “people”. People you work with? Old codebases from your workplace?
Well, from my experience, people don’t write illegible perl code.
You can write illegible code in any language.
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.
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.
http://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol3_2/tpj0302-0012.html
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.