I miss it, but understand why it fell out of favor. It's the closest I've ever gotten to singing whalesong with a machine.
I miss it, but understand why it fell out of favor. It's the closest I've ever gotten to singing whalesong with a machine.
About 15 years ago I was put on a Java project that ran for a year with half a dozen developers toiling away (along with an outsourced team that management eventually added to write unit tests). I spent half that time fighting with Eclipse and the other half divided between tearing my hair out trying to wade through the AbstractSpringFactoryInterfaceAbstractFrameworkInjectorAbstractionBuilder nightmare, being lectured at by people who learned everything they know about computers from in-flight magazines that this is the way professional software development is done, waiting for the one person who could actually build the application (which he did partly by unzipping the jar files and manually tweaking their contents), and actually coding.
To my complete lack of surprise, the project never achieved a working milestone and was cancelled. What did surprise me was that a coworker who was sympathetic to my grumbling persuaded the CTO who was trying to rescue the project to let me try it my way. On my own (using Perl and PostgreSQL), in a couple of weeks, I had a fully working prototype. We got the green light to proceed and built the company's flagship product on that stack. It was not my brilliant engineering as much as Perl's extraordinary ability to connect mind and machine (coupled of course with my brilliant engineering) that made it possible. I owe Larry Wall for a huge career boost.
I once had a long conversation about this with a linguist and Perl programmer that I randomly met in a pub. However, I was quite drunk and don't really recall too much, and we never saw each other again.
Computer programming theory has large swathes of inspiration from theoretical linguistics - think lisp. That's nice for theoreticians because it makes things like parsing easier to think about rigorously. Perl on the other hand, to my knowledge is the only significant programming language to be inspired by practical linguistics, and therefore appeals to concepts like context and ambiguity way more than other languages. This means that a lot of computer scientists academics absolutely hate it, and so it was very much neglected in the education space.
The other side effect of this is you still get a good number of talented programmers with backgrounds in the humanities and social sciences who do very well on perl.
As fast as you type you're coding. Even though I've now spent years in other languages compared to Perl, it's still stop-start in every other language.
I've said it many times, but Perl really moulds to your brain rather than the other way around. You bend Perl how YOU want it.
Funny, a lot of people say that about Lisp...