Re:Pattern matching accepted for Python
by autoexec on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @08:51PM
(#26084945)
I'm glad I'm not the only one around still using and enjoying Perl. I'm just starting to play around in Python now with the plan to rewrite/replace a few older Perl scripts so while I may not get much use out of Perl going forward, it's been great for tasks like log file parsing and reporting.
I still use, and love Perl. If you stick close to the original inspiration of using it to process text, it flows very naturally and isn't hard to read or understand.
I do get that the proliferation of sigils ($,@,%), breadth of built-ins, things like $_, complex dereferencing, and overall terseness are a visual putoff.
It may be that I still like it because it uses mostly the same functions as 'C'...things like stat(), getpwent(), ioctl(), and so forth that were already in my head. And it was way less tedious for strings and text, and no malloc/free to keep track of.