zlacker

>>todsac+(OP)
In fairness, Perl died because it was just not a good language compared to others that popped up after its peak. Sometimes people just move to the better option.

>>mmastr+53
Perl is a great language, the way Scala and Haskell are great: as openly experimental languages, they tried interesting, unorthodox approaches, with varied success. "More than one way to do it" is Perl's motto, because of its audacious experimentation ethos, I'd say.

Perl is not that good a language though for practical purposes. The same way, a breadboard contraption is not what you want to ship as your hardware product, but without it, and the mistakes made and addressed while tinkering with it, the sleek consumer-grade PCB won't be possible to design.

>>nine_k+c5
> "More than one way to do it" is Perl's motto, because of its audacious experimentation ethos, I'd say.

Perl lets every developer write Perl in their own idiosyncratic way.

And every developer does.

It makes for very un-fun times when I'm having to read a file that's been authored by ten developers over ten years, each of whom with varying opinions and skill levels.

I guess in 2026, it'll be 11 developers writing it over 11 years. My sincere apologies to those who come after me, and my sincere fuck-you to those who came before me. :)

>>pavel_+H8
Exactly. Perl is about experimenting, trying things your way, and discovering new and good ways to write programs. Which is a wonderful capability for research and discovery, and for art or recreation, but not that great for industrial production.

This is why Perl was quite fit for the job at the dawn, or, rather, the detonation phase of the Internet explosion in late 1980s and early 1990s, along with Lisp and Smalltalk that promote similar DIY wizardry values. But once the industry actually appeared and started to mature, more teamwork-friendly languages like Java, PHP, and Python started to take over.