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Comment by lasermike026 | Hacker News Reader

Awk has it's uses. If you use the command line you'll probably use Awk occasionally.

I don't get the Perl hate. Perl's unpopularity may have something to do with some of the languages design choices. I think what really killed it was Perl coders. Some of the worst code I've seen happened to be written in Perl. If you follow clean code principles Perl is fine. Mojolicious is an awesome framework. I like it a lot.

Today I code Python and C. I used to code Ruby and before that Perl. I loved Ruby's syntax but Ruby seems to be waning. I'm looking forward to coding in Go. I'll be coding Javascript but I'm not looking forward to it.

Use the tool that fits the job. I have no loyalties to any programming language.

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>Perl's unpopularity

Is a myth actually.

> Tom Radcliffe, recently presented a talk at YAPC North America titled “The Perl Paradox.” This concept refers to the fact that Perl has become virtually invisible in recent years while remaining one of the most important and critical modern programming languages. Little, if any, media attention has been paid to it, despite being ubiquitous in the backrooms of the enterprise.

> Yet at ActiveState, we have seen our Perl business continue to grow and thrive. Increasingly, our customers tell us that not only are they using more Perl but they’re doing more sophisticated things with it. Perl itself recently made it back into the Top 10 of the Tiobe rankings, and it remains one of the highest paying technologies. Therein lies the paradox.

https://www.activestate.com/blog/2016/07/perl-paradox

At the bottom of top 20 now and pretty much no job openings in most countries.

With perl's use cases, I would be a bit surprised to see a job specifically for programming in perl. It's a tool that you use to support your other infrastructure. It's not a tool that you generally use to build up that infrastructure.

Similarly, I don't expect to see many jobs openings for wrenchers, but I fully expect a mechanic being hired someplace to be able to use a wrench.

> see a job specifically for programming in perl

That was exactly seen some twenty years ago. Perl as used to build infrastructure, like entire back-ends for sites and whatever.

You don't see those jobs anymore.

There are generally no job openings for engineers anywhere, because they all rely on headhunters and recruiters.

Try https://perl.careers/ for example.

I first heard of them from this slide deck that any developer, regardless of tech stack, should read: https://de.slideshare.net/perlcareers/how-to-write-a-develop...

> Awk has it's uses. If you use the command line you'll probably use Awk occasionally.

Agreed -- I use awk all the time in shell pipeline.

> I don't get the Perl hate.

The problem is not with writing Perl -- I don't mind using Perl to write scripts and tools. In fact, I like it better than Python for writing glue code.

Reading Perl code -- especially if the code base is old and has been worked upon by multiple people -- now that is a real pain. Don't get me wrong, I have seen some really well written Perl code and have had the good fortune of working with some really smart Perl programmers. But the majority of Perl code I have encountered has been unreadable mess that makes me want to pull my hair out. There are times when I feel it is more productive to rewrite the code in Python than to spend time on the existing code.

> If you follow clean code principles Perl is fine.

Agreed -- except most Perl coders don't. Worse, they make a large chunk of people who contributed to CPAN -- something which was one of the major reasons behind the popularity of Perl.

> Use the tool that fits the job. I have no loyalties to any programming language.

Couldn't agree more.

Yes, Perl is widely known as a write-only programming language.

Correct, because good luck trying to figure out what the hell someone else's Perl program is doing later.

I used to spend up to 40 hours in a Perl debugger trying to figure out what the program is doing, and after going 25 layers deep into the call stack, I'd come out one week later none the wiser as to what that damn spaghetti code was doing. Tracking down any bug would always turn into debugging of epic proportions. I never had such problems debugging machine code!

That is why Perl gets so much hate.

My favorite construct to hate was going through the logic and just as I was about finished trying to understand the state machine at that point hitting an unless{} clause which instantaneously wipes the slate clean. Oh how I hate Perl.

And yet most Perl code was never hard to read and understand, except for stuff like OOP, but OOP is hard in any language. In fact push for OOP is probably one of the notable things that contributed to Perl's decline.

> except for stuff like OOP

That is funny, because one of objectives of OOP was to give code a better structure and therefore make it easier to understand.

> Some of the worst code I've seen happened to be written in Perl

Second that. Worked with a guy who used (and adored) Perl for more than 15 years. His C++ code was so incomprehensible I had to rewrite many things in my spare time.

> I don't get the Perl hate

I would say hate is a strong word but I have 2 issues with Perl:

1) Regex choices made

2) Readability, if someone wrote something in Perl I normally would rewrite it if it took me less time then figuring out what they wrote and wasn't working as expected. Maybe it was just my poor skills but man Perl can be hard to tell what is actually going on.

Don't judge JavaScript before you try it... it has a lot of good tooling around it, and a enthusiastic, and large community.

There is a reason companies like Netflix, and Walmart are heavily invested in using Node.js for their internal services.

Yes, I'm getting there. I'm going to embrace it.

It's like shells or editors. Many `older` beards are mindful of the aspect that not all tools are equal in that most systems had some tools shipped as default and others you had to go and install yourself. Thus they became wise though experience of sticking to using tools that did the job and would be more commonly available. Hence they all grew up with the likes of vi,sh and awk. They did the job and worked well. Yes alternatives became more acesable and now most systems ship with all the flavour of shell and editor as they class the likes of bash,ksh,csh... and emac/perl to be part of those essential common installs. This and space/storage less of a factor as it was decades ago.

Really gets down to personal taste now more than it did in the past, but if a tool works, does the job and the alternatives don't offer any gains, then they stick with that. Not saying the alternatives are bad or worse in any way, or indeed better, they are just different and in some cases, maybe better. At least the core reason of them always being there instead of having to add another dependency and risk factor to a system have become moot these days.

TL;DR some older tools more guaranteed to be upon all systems as a lowest common denominator in the older days than now and legacy always outlives the machine, hence we still run COBOL today as it works, maybe better solutions but rebuilding rome overnight still avoided.

I don’t think it’s just a mythical old greybeard thing. I’m 28 and I use vim for exactly this reason: a vi-like editor, not necessarily vim, is guaranteed to be available everywhere. I don’t have any particular reason to like vim over emacs, other than the fact that there is value in using standard tools.

My favorite OS, FreeBSD, comes with neither bash, nor emacs, nor Perl, so I don’t consider them part of the “lowest common denominator” set even in 2018.

(Funnily enough, it does come with a C++ compiler!)

the most recent version(s) of Javascript are quite pleasurable. A lot has happened in the last 4 years.

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