Re: Perl and the Future

Perl is no longer the "cool" new language

Being the cool language gets people to use it and find its niche, whether large or small. Perl has that already. It's quick, its fast, and its beautiful. Unless seasoned programmers and system administrators disappear overnight, i doubt Perl will leave the scene anytime soon. (We can talk about it after COBOL fades away.) Once a niche is found, pushing the language elsewhere is just plain silly.

Whenever there is more than once choice to provide a solution, we can create three categories, where: X is best, X is worst, and where there is no best and worst. We should not try to push Perl where it doesn't belong. Just where it is best, and people who prefer it can use it elsewhere, where the programmer's preference is the deciding factor. Perhaps the only time to push Perl would be where people don't realize it is the best language for the job. I did that at one company where a COBOL programmer tried to show how COBOL and entire job setup would be best to process reports. I had to explain to the entire team why Perl was the best language, and it was done so and ran brilliantly. (Unfortunately politics came into play and it was rewritten in VB! :( )

When i read the title in my head just now: Perl and the <echo, reverb, or whatever>Future</echo, reverb, or whatever> like a 50s TV show. Also, stating "I thought I'd try to stimulate some discussion" is probably the worst way to stimulate discussion. Something like that is said as an explanation in afterthought, if at all. The best way to stimulate discussion is to go out on a limb and state your own opinion, with no mitigating prefaces, no desires for reply, and to state it well.

Comment on Re: Perl and the Future

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Re^2: Perl and the Future by Dumu (Monk) on Mar 24, 2015 at 16:44 UTC
Perl is the cool language to me. I don't even want to learn Python. Any language without whitespace freedom is ridiculous to me. (Ruby and Lua can wait till I am a Perl master. Scheme may get a look-in at some point sooner.) We should stop saying "Perl is no longer cool". Perl is incredibly cool. People who don't like Perl are what is "not cool", at least until they are proven cool in spite of the massively uncool drawback of not liking Perl. (My dear cousin, a talented PHP developer, gets a pass on this one. Despite being fairly cranky until his 9th coffee and rollup. Just because.)	[reply]
Re^2: Perl and the Future by logicrime (Initiate) on Mar 24, 2015 at 02:41 UTC
My dad has written COBOL almost exclusively for something close to 30 years, and has made a very pretty penny for doing so. I have read some of his code, and it was a glorious thing, despite the inelegant nature of COBOL itself. Thing is, he doesn't want to learn new languages because he doesn't feel like he needs to. He lacks the Perlis aspect of programming languages. I am learning Perl to both make some money and to make my code in other languages as well. I don't think that Perl is the language to end all others, and I don't think that such a language will ever exist. That having been said, I think a major contributing aspect of why Perl popularity is wounded lately is because of web programming and the dissolving frontier of the delineation of front end and back end systems. Node.js is a great example of the blurred lines we are seeing nowadays. Javascript started out as a simple way to get graphics to jump around on web pages, and now it's powering the crypto in my browser, and the databases in web apps, and who knows what else, right? Well, Perl could just as easily do these things, as could practically any other marketable language, if only the time and effort was spent on it.	[reply]
Re^2: Perl and the Future by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Mar 20, 2015 at 16:03 UTC
Agree, with afterword especially. :P I think where there is no clear best and worst is an ideal time to push Perl. This is how a language becomes the best choice. No clear winner exists. A hacker uses her favorite language to create a library or tool or application. Ta! A clear winner is born.	[reply]
Re^3: Perl and the Future by chacham (Prior) on Mar 20, 2015 at 17:01 UTC
Ah, so you're saying if there is no clear best, and the programmer does not already have a preferred language, to suggest Perl. Not a bad idea. Not at all.	[reply]