\o,

maybe this is not a good forum to ask this, but on reddit they were rather quiet ... :-)

I exclusively used Perl 5 and a bit of JavaScript and PHP for my first job, then I somehow focused on PHP completely and started to make money with it. Writing scripts in other languages was never a job choice for me, I just like to learn new things. (Although I guess that knowing more languages will highly increase my job chances anyway.) The occasional Perl here and there (a fun IRC bot in my spare time, a text parser for some of my colleagues at work) was never gone but I didn't invest much time into it.

Some day I needed a website parser for the PHP tool I had been hired to develop. As I had read about Python's urllib just a short time before, I decided to implement that script in Python, not being aware of the actual difference between Python 2 and Python 3. Another hobby, I thought. When the script was nearly complete, I learned that Python 2 is about to be phased out slooooowly and Python 3 lacks a comparable community yet. I assume Python 4 will cause even more trouble, and it's not really worth all that.

I have a couple of other projects in my "To do when there's some more spare time left" list, including a rework of the particular Python script and some web development things. I guess some will be in Common Lisp (learning languages by implementing things in them has always worked out for me), but I also will revive my Perl knowledge. I just don't want to switch to Perl just to see it suffering from the same problem too, Perl 5 being slowly phased out and Perl 6 being not widely accepted. If Perl 5 won't have the same "future" as Python 2, I'm happy to join the old Perl club again; otherwise, I (again) don't really know what to do.

I don't want to rewrite my code every few years just because someone decides that the language I wrote it in is deprecated for no good reason now. Does anyone of you have a deeper, reasonable clue about what will happen with Perl 5 when Perl 6 has gained enough attraction?

Regards and all that, jkl

In reply to Should I come back to Perl? by jekyll

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.