As it stands, unfortunately CPAN is full of rotting modules. While it may be a maintained and usable language still, that puts a huge damper on any non-trivial development, because at any time something important might turn out to be broken or unmaintained, or without an API at all.
I agree hard times. Hubris is at fault.
Perl did too much and reached for the stars. Its happy place was a sane job control language. A niche Python is filling.
I have used both, Perl extensively, Python when I must. Perl is much better, but being better is not enough.
Perl did "everything". Python was "object orientated". People wanted the shiny "object orientated" and, sadly wisely, did not want a language that could do anything and everything.
I blame Larry Wall, the genius, both for Perl's success, and Perl's failure. If only I could fail so brilliantly!
Write a Python function that writes an object's string representation to a file:
def write(obj): open('/tmp/foo', 'w').write(str(obj))
write(123)
write(["spam", "eggs"])
write({(1,2):{3,4,5},('spam','eggs'):{6,7,8}})
At first, I thought I had to be missing something, like maybe it was impossible to do trickier things because they made the simple things so easy, but no. It just turned out that some of Perl's design decisions increased my cognitive load way more than strictly necessary. That's clearly not true for everyone, but it sure was for me. The first day I wrote Python was the last day I wrote Perl.
Well, Data::Dumper is included in core Perl ...
use v5.12.0;
use warnings;
use autodie;
use Data::Dumper;
sub logit {
open state $log, ">>", 'c:/tmp/foo';
print $log Dumper(@_)
}
logit(123);
logit(["spam", "eggs"]);
logit({"(1,2)"=> [3,4,5],"('spam','eggs')"=> [6,7,8]});
# even logging multiple objects at once ...
logit(
123,
["spam", "eggs"],
{"(1,2)"=> [3,4,5],"('spam','eggs')"=> [6,7,8]},
);
And I opened the filehandle only once. And for append not overwrite like you did.
I don't think it was so much hubris as bad communication.
Perl 6 was understood to be that: Perl 6, a definite successor to Perl 5. But besides being very, very late it turned out not to truly be Perl 6, but a new, incompatible, Perl-ish language.
I think the decision to rename it to Raku was a good one, but came too late. By then the world had already moved on.
Done early enough I think it'd have fixed things. It'd have created the clarity needed to understand that Perl 5 wasn't going away, and that it was pointless to wait for a successor.
Bad communication isn't one of those (although, given the prevalence of bad communication in the industry, one might assume it is ...).
maybe that was your happy place for Perl, but it certainly wasn't mine or that of lot of Perl users I've known over the years.
#!/bin/perlish
while (<>) {
/* regex match */
/* do some stuff, with variables or the file system or whatever */
}
I mispoke. "A happy place" I shold have said
I never learnt awk or sed bedcause I knew Perl.
That loop, often in a command line invocation `perl -e 'while(<>){chomp;......}'`
My point is its happy place was not application programming, gui systems. AS I commented elsewhere here processing every Apache hook.
Pythin suffers the same problem. It too is brilliant at the little jobs, yet there are many GUI junk piles written in it, just as happened with Perl back in the day
> I have used both, Perl extensively, Python when I must. Perl is much better, but being better is not enough.
> Perl did "everything". Python was "object orientated". People wanted the shiny "object orientated" and, sadly wisely, did not want a language that could do anything and everything.
I don't know what kind of Python you've tried using, but it seems you got some defective ancient 2.x version. Python is exactly the kind of language that should be replacing Perl, simply because it's the best glue language out there right now, with modules that are actively being maintained and developed.
And, as a cherry on top, actually has human-readable syntax.
When tabs and spaces have different syntactic meaning, I am suffering quite a bit of revulsion.
I have to do it, but I want to control my own white space for my own purposes.
It comes down to taste, I guess. I am not wrong, but neither am I correct
I don't think it has anything to do with it. Perl 5 is an old language. Period. And Javascript came to inherit Perl's position as a "web glue language". These days JavaScript is an okayish language to use in this case.
Raku fka "Perl 6" is out and alive: https://www.raku.org/
It turned out to be a very powerful programming language but lacks the large niches Perl 5 (the web) or Python (machine learning) catered to.
That's an odd way of looking at it. C is an old language. C++ is an old language. Java is an old language. Nobody is arguing against them because they're "old".
Moreover, just because something is old doesn't mean you throw it away. How many newer languages have come, and gone, just in the time since Perl hit its peak?
C lives off its niche as being the lingua franca for programming low level interfaces. Java lives in its corporate niche and C++ mostly in game programming and large desktop applications.
Perl 5 has become an orphan. It’s a programming language nobody needs any more and, hence, shares the fate of many other obsolete languages that may be cool but are unpopular.