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Comment by mulmen | Hacker News Reader

I will always love perl because it got my career off the ground. Anyone who doesn’t just learn it is doing themselves a disservice. It’s similar to SQL in that sense.

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Perl was huge in the early web and first dot-com boom, it was used a lot for CGI scripting.

I probably didn't learn Perl because PHP superseded it for web stuff.

This. PHP was my first "real" programming language (which is a bit scary now that I think about it since it followed me learning QBasic and VB6) and by the time I was messing with it for web dev circa 2003 CGI scripts were on their way out. I suspect that it had something to do with CPanel/WHM-based shared hosting setups being reticent to deal with something as powerful as CGI and preferring to just run PHP in Safe Mode. I could be wrong though as I was also a technically-ignorant punk that fixed phpBB installer filesystem permission issues by 777'ing everything in my hosting directory :-). Good times...

Ha! Cheers! My first language was VB.net and my first paying gig was porting a VB6 app. But my career really started when I took on Perl and Oracle. Good times indeed.

You missed out. Perl is way more than the web. Nobody is grinding up csv files with PHP. But I wired up an Oracle billing system and a MSSQL invoice system in under a month as a junior dev. And it worked.

Every library I needed was at my fingertips on CPAN. And just… worked. Connect to Oracle, run SQL, create a CSV, FTP it somewhere. EZPZ.

I miss CGI internal tooling. It was always fast and just did the thing you want. Now we have bullshit recursive lambdas with nonsense UIs full of harmful whitespace.

I started with Perl CGI and have been less productive every year since then.

Seriously. I feel like 99% of the work I do in Micro-Service/Event-Driven/etc systems could realistically be a few CGI scripts hooked connected to a DB via DBI. It's sort of ironic how people often call Perl "overly complicated" or "confusing" then justify 100+ service clusters using K8's and AWS to serve 1000 users/day. AdventOfCode handles a few million users per day during the weeks it's active, all powered by a few FastCGI scripts, it's still really good technology.

Perl is still great for data munging and ETL. I use it a lot to load data into databases and Elastic indices.

Yep, and that’s exactly what I was doing with it. Still unbeatable IMHO.

I don't think comparing Perl to SQL quite works. There are currently plenty of other widely-used scripting languages that can do the same sort of thing that Perl does (if we consider it in the context of a general purpose scripting language rather than a sed/awk alternative), but the usage of SQL alternatives for querying relational databases is a rounding error.

It works because they both get shit on unfairly today. There’s still no substitute for either of them.

As I said above, there are dozens if not hundreds of substitutes for Perl (as a general-purpose scripting language) now.

For one-liners not quite so many. Only Ruby comes close.

I'm younger than a lot of folks on HN, but I've never touched Perl for anything more than some copy-pasted shell one-liners from stack overflow. Granted, web isn't what I get paid to do, but I still know Ruby, Python, a bit of SQL, etc... I've just never really had a use case for Perl, nor am I totally sure what that use case would look like.

Well Perl isn’t (just) a web language. And this article does a pretty good job explaining what it is. Which is a powerful, lightweight general purpose programming language.

CPAN alone is worth the price of admission. I started my career using Perl to build Excel spreadsheets from queries I ran against Oracle DB. That may sound horrible but it was actually plug and play. Really simple and just worked. I could even fire off emails from the script. Just zero hurdles (or guard rails).

Feeling called out that I don't know Perl or SQL :)

Consider yourself called out. I suggest starting with SQL.

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