[SOLAR_FIELDS]

Curious - is there a reason to use Perl (Wall's latest version, 5 or whatever) in 2022 if one has no familiarity with the language? What would be the major advantage of using Perl over its closest analogues, some bastardization of Bash and Python?

[doomvox]

Well, Larry Wall's latest project was called "Perl 6" but has been renamed "Raku"-- in belated recognition that it really is a new language, and Perl is going to continue being Perl.

The main reason to learn Raku at present is simply that it's profoundly different from most other things out there-- there's no particular "killer app" that's emerged for it, but it's unusual enough that this might happen yet (no one expected Perl would be critical for "Web 1.0" and the Human Genome Project...).

Some Raku features:

(1) it's numeric types include true rational numbers, so there's less chance of being tripped up by floating point approximations (e.g. 2/3 is really 2/3, and if you multiply by 3 later you get precisely 2). It also does big integers by default: you're less likely to have overflow problems.

(2) Raku's regular expressions have been redesigned from scratch, and it ships with expanded capabilities to compose them into larger structures called "grammars": Raku is a uniquely powerful tool for writing special-purpose parsers, ala domain-specific languages. (Note: this is how Raku parses itself-- it's not implemented in the usual lex and yacc style.)

(3) Extremly convenient features for handling CAP (concurrency, asynchrony, parallelism), possibly the easiest to use of any language.

As for Perl (meaning the original, Perl 5), it's vastly superior to traditional bash scripting because all the components were brought into one process where they could be made more consistent and talk to each other easily.

How Perl compares to Python is a little difficult for me to answer: I prefer Perl, but I could be biased on this one, and there's no question Python has quite a bit of momentum at present in a number of areas.

[throwaway2037]

Thank you to provide 1, 2, 3 above. I didn't know about these!

I am surprised you didn't mention Perl 11 which is try to mash Perl 5 and 6/Raku together. Is that still happening? Or do I have it wrong?

"How Perl compares to Python": The first thing I tell Perl programmers who are starting to learn Python: There are Perl-style references in Python. (If you are not familiar with Perl: These are a roughly pointers, and can be 'undefined' / null.) In short: You cannot create a reference to a scalar in Python. Perl hackers then scratch their head and ask, "Well then, how do I build XYZ data structure without...?" The easy workaround is a single element tuple or list. "Aha!" Otherwise, Perl programmers can adapt very quickly to Python.

[lizmat]

perl 11 is dead. It was never much more than a mirage by a few people outside of the Perl community. It was definitely not something supported by what is now the Raku community.

[KerrAvon]

Ruby is a much more hospitable environment for ex-Perl people, IMHO.

[collyw]

I was 50/50 in 2011 between Python and Ruby (Django / Rails). Went with python in the end, kind of glad I did. Ruby has fallen off a lot in popularity, while python hasn't. Also Python seems to be a lot more general purpose, while ruby is a lot more web development focused.

[throwaway2037]

Sorry, I cannot edit. I meant to say: There are no Perl-style references in Python.

[singingfish]

This is one way to think about it. If you take your glasses off and squint a little, underneath perl and python work in extremely similar ways, and basically do the same thing. Python is a dynamic language created to provide uniformity of syntax. Perl is a dynamic language designed to provide flexibility of syntax - wherein it has natural language features like list/scalar context.

Both of these approaches have their advantages. I have a saying I overuse: "Python helps you think more like the computer does, Perl helps the computer think more like you do". The consequence of this is that python is good at helping people think about tasks that the computer is good at in - like statistical problems. On the other hand perl is good at helping to contain the mess and chaos of the real world in a way that makes it more tractable for the computer - which is why it remains popular in the recruitment industry backends and other less tidy business areas.

Perl's very raw unvarnished object model is in fact based on python's, so it is very similar, but it's also built for flexibility. This means object models like Moo[1] which are really nice flexible and done right make it really easy to write extendable applications. Implementing python's object model in perl (i.e pretty much the exact specification) is easy. However you can't implement perl's object model in python except by messing with the guts of the python interpreter.

I haven't done any commercial python - I only have a passing aquaintance really from messing with sympy and the like. But boy perl has been good to me. I earn a good living in an interesting job and I can maintain interests out of work as well. And I haven't had to look hard for work for years. Of course currently I'm neck deep in recursive SQL queries.

[1] https://metacpan.org/pod/Moo - My favourite job to date was building a back end to spin up network devices, that got one gentle refactor after the initial implementation and was then subsequently extended to three or four completely different network device architectures extremely quickly. Mostly by virtue of making almost every object property read only and memoised on demand (extensions to existing methods would are likewise inlined on complilation - all done with object composition rather than inheritance too for an added layer of sanity)

[kevin_thibedeau]

You can think of Perl as a super AWK. That's really the genesis of it's design philosophy, hence all the special automatic variables and modes to implement processing loops on the command line. From a scripting standpoint, the language is designed to be used with much less ceremony than Python and its ilk.

[forgotmypw17]

I use Perl over Bash because I'm more familiar with the C-like, PHP-like syntax with parentheses, curly braces, if/else, while, and sigils. I'm also a fan of both strict and taint, which have saved me countless hours.

I use Perl over Python because of the culture/tradition of not introducing breaking changes into the language/runtime, which has also saved me countless hours. I'm also a fan of arbitrary whitespace for formatting.

Perl is ubiquitous in the *nix world. Combined with its stability and my avoidance of third-party libraries, I can run my scripts basically anywhere without struggling with dependencies, version mismatches, etc.

[bmn__]

* Unicode's high hanging fruits implemented competently and correctly

* not grinding a theoretical axe against the user

* language changeable at run-time to some degree, so stealing new ideas from other languages and keeping up with advancements in PLT can be and is done by end users, not only the maintainers

[throwaway2037]

I don't write any Perl scripts these days, but I still use Perl one-liners frequently at a Bash command prompt and in Bash shell scripts.

Example: Convert Windows newlines to UNIX newlines: $ ... | perl -p -e 's/\r\n/\n/g' | ...

My brain is too full to remember how to do similar regexy transformations using sed, but I know it can be done.

[thesuperbigfrog]

>> Curious - is there a reason to use Perl (Wall's latest version, 5 or whatever) in 2022 if one has no familiarity with the language? What would be the major advantage of using Perl over its closest analogues, some bastardization of Bash and Python?

It depends on what you are trying to do.

Perl excels at processing text particularly if you are familiar with regular expressions.

Perl mainstreamed regular expressions and most programming languages that support regular expressions support some subset of Perl regular expressions.

Perl is faster than both Bash and Python and scales up a bit better than Python as a project starts to grow because 'use strict' and 'use warnings' will catch many errors. Python has a better 'batteries included' standard library, so it tends to be better at prototyping than Perl unless you are pulling in libraries in which case it depends on what you are trying to do.

Perl can be more terse than Python, particularly if you are using built-in variables. However, this impacts legibility which is part of the reason why Perl is the target of 'executable line noise' jokes.