Slashdot Mirror
Perl's Glory Days Are Behind It, But It Isn't Going Anywhere
snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia waxes philosophical about Perl stagnancy in IT. 'A massive number of tools and projects still make the most out of the language. But it's hard to see Perl regaining its former glory without a dramatic turnaround in the near term. As more time goes by, Perl will likely continue to decline in popularity and cement its growing status as a somewhat arcane and archaic language, especially as compared to newer, more lithe options. Perhaps that's OK. Perl has been an instrumental part of the innovation and technological advancements of the last two decades, and it's served as a catalyst for a significant number of other languages that have contributed heavily to the programming world in general.'"
In my third year of varsity, we had to write a search engine with indexing stored in files. My Perl solution returned results twice as fast (averaging 22ms/query) as any other in the class, most of which were C or C++. And it took me half the time to write.
I love Perl mainly because of I am a lazy programmer. Yes, most of my Perl scripts take a little bit longer to execute, but we're talking a difference of seconds or minutes, not hours. There are times where I choose Perl, Python, C/C++, PHP, etc, but this depends entirely on the problem and the circumstances. I will use Perl until I die, even if there aren't any more releases from now on.
Should we lament Bash for the same reasons? The last release (4.2) was 13 Feb 2011, and the last feature release (4.0) in early 2010. ZOMG!