[jamal-kumar]

A couple of the things that perl has over python and ruby... #1 is execution overhead, although that may have changed in recent times. #2 is that it's preinstalled on most linux/BSD OS's as a requirement for its plumbing, which makes it nice if you're trying to run a system on minimal dependencies.

It's ugly for all the reasons that people complain about it for but those are largely complaints and the rest of us have work to get done.

Oh yeah, and if you liked perl - I highly recommend learning AWK/SED. Even lower on the execution overhead (Can do shit in the processor cache and avoid memory allocation bottlenecks on enormous hundreds of gigabyte CSV datasets with a crappy processor in milliseconds kind of stuff)

[heresie-dabord]

Perl is excellent for data analysis in a terminal.

It is built to work with pipes, it's fast, concise, stable, and easy to extend. The REGEX integration is superb.

It seems to me that we have a couple of generations of programmers who turn up their nose at anything that isn't Python notation and then repeat vague arguments about Python's superiority. But like all dogmatic systems, there is no agreement among the zealots.

Python is far from perfect; I see many problems in the Python ecosystem. There remains much to be said for concision and expressivity in other languages. In any case, by the time one has written enough Python, one sees that the "purity of notation" is a myth. And the DSLs within Python (Pandas, Numpy) offer their own pain.

awk, sed, grep, C, C++, Java, and Perl are excellent tools.

[jamal-kumar]

Python wins out the popularity contest because of ease of readability that I think we can take for granted. Perl is true wizardry, I mean 'sigils' and stuff you need to know in order to make it work... Plenty harder to get at first glance for sure but it's truly occult in a lot of ways. I think that's kind of cool.

The way I see it is that you can do interesting things in pretty much every computer language written out there, it's just some are more arcane than others in some ways than others.

I remember when python started getting big and all the old perl heads were complaining about the forced indentation hahahaha

[cutler]

Ruby is a more natural transition from Perl, especially if your usage of Perl is Moose-based.