[chromatic]

Oh my why would anyone want to lean Perl anymore?

Because it's powerful, it's easy to start, it's flexible, it's productive, it's ubiquitous, and it has an unparalleled extension ecosystem devoted to quality and ease of use.

[derrickpetzold]

lol so do all the languages mentioned above plus they are prettier.

[rjbond3rd]

I don't think you read what you're responding to. How can they all have an "unparalleled extension ecosystem"?

[derrickpetzold]

Thank you I did read the post. Python has pypi. Ruby has gems. I'm not going to google the rest but if they don't have one there is no reason why they can't.

And FYI pypi is better than CPAN so all the other stuff in the that post is crap imho. I was a Perl dev for ~10 years. Now have about 5 worth of Python. So thank you.

[Mithaldu]

I don't know about python, but ruby's gems are quite inferior. Just two points:

gems has no idea if any specific gem is already installed, so if you ask it to, it will just install over whatever is there, no matter if it's the same or not.

Additionally it does not automatically run tests and abort if they fail, so the chance of installing a broken gem over your existing working gem is pretty big.

[otterley]

There is a culture of documentation, cooperation and tolerance in the Perl community that, IME, doesn't really exist for other language communities (Ruby and Python).

Compare, for example, AnyEvent's documentation with that of Twisted - or any of Perl's standard documentation with that of Ruby.

[chromatic]

I'm not going to google the rest but if they don't have one there is no reason why they can't.

That somehow fails to convince me that other language ecosystems parallel the CPAN in breadth, scope, maturity, and ecosystem. See CPAN Testers, for example.

[derrickpetzold]

Oh my apologies I wasn't trying to convince anyone of anything if that's what you are thinking. I was only stating fact based on my experience but that's okay just downvote this and make yourself right.

[kamaal]

Nobody was down voting you to make themselves right. But the remarks that you made about CPAN to be frank didn't make any sense at all to anybody who has worked with CPAN seriously over years.

Both in terms of quantity and quality CPAN beats any other scripting ecosystem by a very great margin. And its really not about the number of the modules. That many number of modules would not have been possible if Perl(syntax, extensions system) was not flexible enough to allow them.

The traditional approach used by languages is to first build a set of semantics define a syntax and standard library for it. Then any other development in that language happens through frameworks and libraries. Perl is special in this case that Perl allows syntax extensions through modules. There fore you will find not just Modules to do your task, but also modules that add and extend to exiting Perl syntax with sugar. Perl 6 extends this concept further through grammars.

How often and how many language are there today(Counting Python and Ruby especially) that can add something like Moose(Moosex extensions) and other syntactical extension to their language, without breaking backwards compatibility?

Python took around 8 years and broke backwards compatibility to make as little changes as context of a for loop and print statement. Now imagine what it would take Python to fix its object system or its scoping problems.