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Comment by waldopat | Hacker News Reader

One day Perl will be on this list

I'm not convinced. Which languages have Perl influenced, really? All the things that other languages seem to draw from Perl could just as well have come from e.g. awk, Smalltalk, and other languages that came before Perl.

Most of the uniquely Perly things (topicalisation, autovivification, regexes in the language syntax, context sensitivity) haven't been picked up by other languages.

The only really Perly thing that was picked up elsewhere is CPAN, but that's not part of Perl-the-programming-language but Perl-the-community.

(Oh I guess PHP picked up sigils from Perl but misunderstood them and that was the end of that.)

Regexes in syntax / regex literals made it into JS and Ruby (at least).

> Which languages have Perl influenced, really?

Raku is a direct descendant.

Did Raku see any uptake from people outside the shrinking Perl world?

Perl's big influence is Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions, to the point many younger people just assume "regular expression" means "pcre".

In terms of direct language impact, Ruby code rarely shows that these days, but it was essentially designed in a way to easily migrate from Perl ways

Besides the regex literals, Ruby does have sigils of a sort (@ and $) but with different meanings. Also the quotelike operators (q, qx, qw becomes %q, %x, %w).

If we assume peak Perl was in the 00s, say 2005, an impressionable teenager of ~15 learning by then probably will keep using it for the rest of their life, even in absence of uptake by new people. Assuming a lifespan of 85, I estimate this day won't arrive before the 2070s.

I started using it in the mid-90s, and used it extensively at work as long as I could, but by 2012 I gave up the fight. I still break it out once in a great while for a quick text transformation, but it’s so rusty in my memory that I rely on an LLM to remind me of the syntax.

I think peak Perl was before then, but that's about when Perl fell off the map and started getting replaced by Python or PHP to replace CGI since it had some syntactic overlap.

This is when I started professionally and we were asked to replace "slow, old Perl scripts" As a new entrant, I didn't ask many questions, but I also didn't see any of the replacements as improvements in any way. I think the # of devs left to take over messy Perl projects was shrinking.

As you might imagine, this job involved a lot of text processing. People still point to that as the arrow in Perl's quiver, but it seems especially quaint today since any language I'd reach for would blow it out of the water in terms of flexibility and ease of use.

That's how I remeber the time line.

But I thought maybe the end of the 00s was when ror started showing up.

Mid 2000s I think i was learning php and lamp stack. Perl was already kind of old

I was that teenager and I still think Perl is very neat but I don't think I can write it anymore without lots of doc reading.

I came here to write - I think awk would fit in the list.

Awk is sold on pattern matching, and there are earlier technologies that do pattern-matching - ML, SNOBOL.

But awk's historic significance is something else: it was the embryonic scripting language. You could use it in an imperative manner, and in 1977 that showed a new path to interacting with a unix system. It allowed you to combine arithmetic, string manipulation, and limited forms of structured data processing in a single process without using a compiler.

Two language schools grew from imperative awk. (1) The scripting language that expose convenient access to filesystem and OS syscalls like perl/pike/python/ruby; (2) The tool control languages like tcl/lua/io.

It may also have influenced shell programming. Note that awk was released before the Bourne shell.

I would like to agree – I'm always surprised when I realise how old awk it. It feels like an incredibly modern language. It's also obvious that it inspired the likes of dtrace and bpftrace.

That said, I don't know how many other languages explicitly have cited awk as an inspiration, which was the criterion for this list.

You think awk would fit the list but then go on to show how useful it was and still is today.

I often read answers to questions all over the internet where awk is part of the solution. Mainly serious programmers using BSD and Linux.

My comment did not talk about where awk is useful today.

Unix gurus will recommend awk as a pattern matching and substitution tool.

But my comment was about awk the vanguard imperative scripting language. I don't know of anyone who recommends use of awk's imperative style over python in 2025.

As an exercise, I tried writing a simple roguelike in awk in an imperative style. Within twenty minutes, it felt obvious where perl came from.

As will Python and many others.

Classic HN. A comment meant in half jest is dissected technically and literally and down voted. LOL Anyways, I'm glad the Perl crowd is alive and well!

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