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by uhtred 1489 days ago
> On an unrelated note, it would be pretty cool to have extremely slowly moving and stable languages, projects and tooling out there. To see maybe 3 or 4 releases in my entire lifetime and to have the next generation take over the burden. Then again, seeing how COBOL and FORTRAN are now, perhaps that sense of grandeur isn't worth the effort and old projects should just die.

Isn't that Perl?

1 comments

Kind of, though the whole Raku thing made everything a tad wonky.

Some of the nicer Perl software that I use currently is BackupPPC, which has been pretty solid despite the slightly subpar UI: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc

And another interesting piece that I can think of was RemoteBox, which was pretty niche but still worked nicely: https://remotebox.knobgoblin.org.uk/?page=about

From the more popular packages, one should also mention exiftool, which was written in Perl: https://github.com/exiftool/exiftool

Probably also a lot of other pieces of software, though it doesn't seem like there's much of a large/active community around Perl, for example, have a look at: https://github.com/trending/perl?since=monthly and then compare it to something like: https://github.com/trending/go?since=monthly

In regards to other contenders, I think FreePascal/Lazarus should also be mentioned, since they're pretty stable, capable and perhaps some of the better ways to write desktop software!

I had no idea exiftool was writen in Perl!
Here's a few other tools that are written in Perl, sorted by GitHub popularity: https://github.com/EvanLi/Github-Ranking/blob/master/Top100/...

Actually, that repo has lists like this for most languages: https://github.com/EvanLi/Github-Ranking