The reports of Perl’s death have been greatly exaggerated

Re:The reports of Perl’s death have been greatly exaggerated by munificent on Wednesday October 20, 2021 @02:42PM (#28934432)

This is a bit like asking what's wrong with your ranch by describing the grass. The problem is there's no cows on it.

You might argue that sufficiently appealing grass might persuade cows on other ranches to jump the fence and come over, but the reality is that the grass on those other ranches is very nice at this point and getting greener faster than the grass on Perl Ranch.

The users are gone and aren't coming back. Without those, you don't have a language.

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Re:The reports of Perl’s death have been greatly exaggerated by steveklabnik on Wednesday October 20, 2021 @03:50PM (#28935385)

I have a tattoo of a Perl camel, and of a Ruby ruby. I loved Perl, but to me anyway, Ruby was 95% of the good stuff of Perl, with 5% of the downsides. Some of that last 5% of good stuff was things that you could even argue isn't actually good stuff, but I like it anyway. ($_ is my go-to example for this.)

"Why not {Ruby,Python,PHP,JavaScript}?" is imho the question that Perl has to answer, and hasn't found one that enough folks find compelling, it seems.

This thread is making me so nostalgic... it's hard to overstate how influential Perl was on me.

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Re:The reports of Perl’s death have been greatly exaggerated by Tanjreeve on Thursday October 21, 2021 @03:51AM (#28941581)

Do you have any other programming language related tattoos of so that people know those are going to die too?

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Re:The reports of Perl’s death have been greatly exaggerated by steveklabnik on Thursday October 21, 2021 @03:06PM (#28949430)

I do not currently. Not sure Ruby is dead yet though...

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Re:The reports of Perl’s death have been greatly exaggerated by petre on Thursday October 21, 2021 @09:36AM (#28944123)

I'd definiely switch to Roby anytime now that it's also faster, post 2.5. But our codebase is written in Perl 5. Why now Perl 6/Raku? Because it's slow and also has a smaller community around it.

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Re:The reports of Perl’s death have been greatly exaggerated by munificent on Thursday October 21, 2021 @01:43PM (#28948150)

What's the status of your Rust crab tattoo?

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Re:The reports of Perl’s death have been greatly exaggerated by steveklabnik on Thursday October 21, 2021 @03:05PM (#28949419)

I've been joking that I only get tattoos of languages I don't really use anymore.

Also that "RUST CRAB" would fit on my knuckles...

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Re:The reports of Perl’s death have been greatly exaggerated by nrdvana on Thursday October 21, 2021 @12:27AM (#28940260)

I like your analogy. But the more accurate statement is that perl has a fraction as many cows as it once had, but still more cows than other not-dead languages. It still gets more daily uploads to CPAN than Haskell gets to hackage.haskell.org packages, for instance.

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Re:The reports of Perl’s death have been greatly exaggerated by munificent on Thursday October 21, 2021 @01:45PM (#28948197)

> still more cows than other not-dead languages.

It may still have a lot of cows, but it clearly doesn't have many calves and that's the statistic that speaks to the eventual fate of the language.

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