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.'"

Comments

Wait, what?

[girlintraining]

So let me get this straight: A programming language that found a niche, became massively popular, and is now widely used... is a failure in your eyes because it's not in a constant state of change?

You're kidding, right? The epitome of a successful programming language is that it has become flexible enough to meet the needs of its users without requiring more than maintenance fixes. This is like saying "grep is useless because nobody's completely redesigned in in the last few months!" Dude, stop drinking the Web 2.0 kool-aid. There are things in the computer world that aren't meant to change every day. I know it's hard to imagine when every pundit is screaming "release early, release often" from every rooftop, but speaking from experience... If you go mangling your programming language every few months like (cough, .NET) some companies do, you're going to find your developers bailing out like rats from a sinking ship.

Re:Wait, what?

[LordLucless]

So let me get this straight: A programming language that found a niche, became massively popular, and is now widely used... is a failure in your eyes because it's not in a constant state of change?

Uh, no, that'd be you putting words into the writer's mouth. How about this:

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.

It's not failing because it's not changing, it's failing because less people are using it. The lack of it integrating shiny new features may be one of the factors contributing to this.

Re:Wait, what?

[solidraven]

No, you look at Perl in the wrong way! The camel is good at what it's designed for. It won't do it neatly but it'll get the job done. Need to hack two incompatible systems together quickly? Perl is there for you. Need low level access from a scripting language? Perl fills the gap. And in terms of performance the old camel still gives a lot of new "optimized" languages a run for their money. It's also one of the most flexible languages out there. Name a few other scripting languages that are used on such a wide range of systems? You'll encounter Perl on the small embedded systems and on large clusters. It simply adapts to the task at hand. It's sort of like Fortran and Ada in that, many people are against it but those who are familiar with it know what it's capable off aren't going to drop it cause it looks ugly to the younger programmers.

In case you're wondering Fortran is the best data crunching language out there and Ada is in a league of its own when it comes to reliability. Idealism doesn't have a place in engineering, you use the right tool for the job and stop whining about how easy it is to use or master.

Re:Wait, what?

[ThePhilips]

That is excellent. Considering that that particular benchmark is arithmetical and Perl has nearly zero optimizations for the arithmetic.

Re:Wait, what?

[Tridus]

That "bloody whitespace" is one of the reasons your average python code is more readable than your average perl code. You don't see a lot of python code that should actually be 30 lines but is crammed into one because the developer though that line breaks are some kind of precious resource.

Re:Wait, what?

[arielCo]

$foo is one (scalar) variable, which is not the same as @foo (array), and %foo (hash) and foo (file handle), which can coexist without interference, and no Perl programmer will be confused by that (we actually think of the sigil as *part* of the name, as in "dollar foo" and "percent foo"). So it's not redundant syntax, which Perl avoids like the plague.

They're also there to ensure that you're getting the right kind of value when you build an expression, like @stooges = @people{('curly','larry','moe')} (stooges is an array, people is a hash). That is the kind of compact syntax that makes it popular as opposed to iterating over the keys to add the values to the array.

What is Perl?

[prefec2]

Perl is a historically a combination of bash, awk and sed. And for purposes well suited where people would use the former three tools to implement shell scripts to help administration tasks on a daily basis. However, Perl is not so well suited for other purposes, like small and medium sized web applications. Therefore, it will not gain any more ground in that area, as better tools are available. The first Perl enemy was PHP. While PHP sucks in many ways, it was better designed to write simple dynamic web pages. Today it is used for medium sized web applications, which is clearly a dangerous thing, but still it restricts the growth of Perl in that direction, as younger coders came first in contact with PHP and all the hosters support PHP, but not everyone is supporting Perl. Also things like Joomla or Typo3 are PHP based and many people start coding by extending them.

For custom application or other mostly larger system Java-based or .NET-based technologies are used. Perl has nothing to do in that area. It lost its job there many years ago. InterShop was once coded in Perl, but - well - who cares?

As the Unix command shell is only a limited realm (in number of installations), Perl will never become that widespread again. At least that is my assumption considering today software base and structure, as well as the education in programming languages.