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by vgy7ujm 2849 days ago
We want Perl support!
4 comments

As much as I love Perl, it has a reputation of being exceedingly difficult to parse accurately, hence IDE support will never be great. There's also probably more demand to support hipster languages than last generation's work horses.
I don't use it since 2000's, but ActiveState's Komodo used to be ok.
Perl is very tricky. Its syntax is undecidable, so unless you run the program it's not possible to construct a syntax tree given input (in the general case, it's possible to make heuristics that will cover 99%) so it requires more brain power compared to easy-to-parse languages like python.
There are several perl extensions from language support, general debugging etc. Though this can probably be improved, I think it has a lot of the same challenges that Ruby support has. A limited user base, and a comparatively flexible language.