Re:Linux mode setting, from the comfort of OCaml
by antonvs on Tuesday November 18, 2025 @01:22AM
(#45961960)
The number of people willing to brave hacking in Perl seems to have fallen off a cliff - for good reason - so itβs a weird choice of example.
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Re:Linux mode setting, from the comfort of OCaml
by mos87 on Tuesday November 18, 2025 @09:53AM
(#45966960)
If falling out of fashion is that good reason then yeah.
At least it's not a highbrow esoteric language thingy that next to no-one in the wild used to begin with.
I've personally fixed an early noughties Perl script where one of the modules it used had changed its name (but thankfully not the interface, not significantly at least), among a couple of other compat problems. Fixing it turned out pretty straightforward even for someone who's far from a greybeard Perl "hacker".
Re:Linux mode setting, from the comfort of OCaml
by antonvs on Tuesday November 18, 2025 @11:40PM
(#45975925)
Perl didn't just fall out of fashion. It failed as a language because it wasn't able to keep up with what other languages could do in practice. The people behind Perl recognized that, but weren't able to agree on a solution. So usage of the language collapsed.
A big part of the problem wasn't that you couldn't write good code with Perl, but that there were too many ways to write bad code with it. That made it anathema for any sort of corporate development, which is the main driver of programming language progress.