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
Not really. It wasn’t audacious in service of anything innovative. Haskell takes functional programming to the nth degree, scala tried to be an advanced Java for example better at concurrency.

Perl was an early dynamic (garbage collected) “scripting language” but no more advanced than its contemporary python in this regard.

It had the weird sigils due to a poor design choice.

It had the many global cryptic variables and implicit variables due to a poor design choice.

It has the weird use of explicit references because of the bad design choice to flatten lists within lists to one giant list.

It actually was the one thing you said it wasn’t - a good practical general language at least within web and sysadmin worlds. At least until better competitors came along and built up library ecosystems.