Python is not better in every way, it’s just more general-purpose, so has a wider range of applicability.
Also more people use it, though by that logic we should all be forced to use Windows bc everyone else does as well?
And Perl both still exists and is actively maintained, so it “lost prominence” rather than “died”.
Good advice:)
So *I* who am careful to write readable and safe code, have to use a non-preferred language preference b/c someone else cannot handle using it properly?!
Sadly, that is the realization that I have come to as well. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link and all that… but no, really, that’s true, b/c modifications are likely to be made at some point (kinda biasing towards production there but even so, answers with perl one-liners on e.g. StackOverflow are ubiquitous, but someone would have to know the language to be able to modify them to suit their specific use-case, so also not at the same time).
Fwiw I really did not think that Perl was hard to learn - though that was coming from the likes of assembly, various Basic styles, C/C++, and having already learned regular expressions via Unix e.g. grep and awk and sed. “Regular expressions” are quite a steep learning curve, though that’s not the same thing as Perl, and quite frankly Perl is the undisputed (iirc?) master of them all, so whether someone wanted to write Perl without those, or wanted to do try to do regular expressions without Perl, either way Perl seems good for having included regular expressions, not something to penalize the entire language for. Also, C/C++ (and Rust) has a bit of a known learning curve as well…:-) Though indeed it’s entirely fair to say that if someone were to pick just one language, then I would be hard pressed to find any justification for that being Perl. C/C++, Java, Python - all of these, depending on the situation, are fine choices, whereas Perl is absolutely niche.
But even so, why would it follow that it would necessarily be a good thing if Perl, or let’s say awk, would fully “go away”? I kinda see Perl and awk as being in the same boat these days - both niche and powerful, yet both steadily becoming obsolete? Just b/c something else is “better” doesn’t mean that everything else must die. Except, as you mentioned, for reasons of collaboration and thus code-reuse. Even there though, putting all of our eggs into a single basket scares me: what if tomorrow Microsoft, or Google, decides to purchase the rights to Python and suddenly control that entire industry sector in one fell swoop?
I have never quite understood this mode of thinking - I think it must be an imprecise statement. Yes, improper usage of Perl coding can be bad, but then so too can C/C++ with e.g. improper memory management? Yet, I don’t see people knocking down doors to learn the memory-safe Rust (and e.g. thereby be able to contribute to the Lemmy codebase), probably bc despite it being “better”, it also has a steep learning curve (and I don’t even know but I would assume: even for someone who already knows C?). Instead, people seem to want to learn Go, or Java - okay so that’s a rabbit hole b/c they are for entirely different purposes, but anyway I mean that each language has its own balance of trade-offs.
So while on the one hand the worst-case scenario from a poor coder for Perl seems significantly worse than for Python, there are also benefits too: doesn’t Perl run up to 20x faster than Python, which is why many places e.g. booking.com have chosen to use it? In the hands of an experienced person, perl code is quite readable, while in contrast, I just absolutely HATE aspects of Python such as whitespace delimiting and the package management, plus I don’t know if I am imagining things (is is likely) but the code just seems to me to look obtuse, by comparison.
Sometimes I’ll use awk, other times I’ll bump that up to a Perl one-liner or even full script, still other times demand Python or for number-crunching full C/C++, or Java for whatever reason, but… for things that you want fast & easy, I don’t really see Perl as “bad”? Granted, it shouldn’t be someone’s first language these days, compared to C or Python, but what is wrong with it, like awk, continuing to exist these days? Especially if it’s not in a production environment.
I’m listening.
Isn’t exactly this kind of thing what is mostly responsible for the demise of Perl?
As I heard it told, the developers of Perl worked so long & hard on the next version after Perl 5, but then veered off to make a new language (Raku) and despite the reality being otherwise, people feared so much that Perl would die (i.e. that 6 would never materialize) that in the meantime “everyone” had switched to Python (despite it clearly being an inferior language - hehehehe:-P).
So that would be a “con” I suppose, if fights over which language is better ends up diluting efforts to work on or with either.
They’re not sending their best and brightest folks. And some I assume are good people, but…
The one who is neither not-x nor not that not-x.
Make absolutely certain to have the sound on - it’s a big part of the whole experience!:-)
The chicken, being species-fluid, wonders why everyone has to put a label onto everything:-) 🤔
No, it is we who have failed the planet.
Truly the “good” place indeed.
Wait, no, trio is glad inside. Test this got plus on? Aaaaaaaa!
You… you shut up! Excuse me, I have to go take a shower:-) (/s, edit: to be clear on both sentences here)
Anyway you’re right (no /s) - at one point it filled in a gap between the likes of C++ and Assembly on the one hand and shell scripting (bash, awk, grep, sed, each with its own syntax and very little of that shared in common with one another) and I guess Fortran on the other. I still prefer it enormously to everything else - it’s quirky but fun:-) - though I get why a less experienced person should choose Python and stick with it, even as we all wish that there was another alternative that would work better than either.
And since I can’t resist: Perl is 8-20x faster than Python, and major websites like DuckDuckGo and booking.com use it. Sigh…I guess it’s time for that shower now:-).
Perl is… forgotten entirely, despite its efforts in getting us from there to here.
Yup, checks out.
PHP also, but good riddance:-D.
Shell scripting is the ink that makes up these words - without them, you would never have seen this image.
Hi I’m auto-“corrector”. There, ftfy. :-P
But… it didn’t need “fixing”? Oh…
I’m guessing it says “either I’m being forced to use this language or it’s the only related one I know how to use, but only halfway”:-)
People keep saying Python, despite how it (1) sucks, and (2) is super annoying to keep up to date, with package management and the like, unlike Perl that is more stable. Though Python is also easy to use and powerful and extensible.
But I think each language type is what it is and has its own set of tradeoffs and balances. Unix is hyper-stable and secure but limited, Perl is powerful but requires discipline to use to full effect, and these days most people don’t bother to learn it. Python is… “common”, is perhaps the best way to put it:-). C/C++ is even more powerful, the latter bloated, and blamed for most memory management issues (although really, how much of that is merely bad programming practice? Okay, so it allows such though).
And now Rust is the new hot thing.:-)
Fair - and in fact doubly so bc even code that is readable in a language that someone else does not know (well) isn’t so “readable” by definition. i.e. “readable by someone who knows the language” != “readable by most developers”.
Though having to rediscover how our code works is something shared by all languages. Perl does allow the worst there though.