zlacker

That's an interesting observation - and my recollection is that the perl heyday was just about before the Googlefication of the world; certainly before stacked overflowing.

Grab a snippet of Java or Python and you can google it pretty easily, grab some line noise from perl and you would first need something to translate it into idiomatic text - search engines would search for "OUTPUT_AUTOFLUSH" but would often discard things like "$|++"

I remember learning my use of perl from a red book - probably "Perl 5 by Example" - everything was in books back then, and you read them. Now you learn programming via searches and LLMs, so the languages that win going forward are going to be the ones optimized for that.

>>bombca+(OP)
> search engines would search for "OUTPUT_AUTOFLUSH" but would often discard things like "$|++"

Out of curiosity, I tried

    perl "$|"

in DDG and Google. DDG returned nothing, but Google led with "perl $|=1; What is this?", and "Perl, what does $|++ do?", both from Stack Overflow. Search like it's 2014, eh? I don't have a time machine, but I'm pretty sure that quoting would've worked ten years ago, too.