| >It is installed by default everywhere. I don’t need administrative privileges to deploy Perl code almost anywhere. That is extremely empowering. Not true anymore. FreeBSD dropped it from base. >With a great amount of discipline, Perl scripts can be successfully scaled up into large, complex systems. History shows different. Perl was never designed for this. >I can be confident that a Perl script I write today will run unaltered 10 years from now, modulo external collaborators. I concur. I also have 10-ish lines perl scripts running on my systems since 10-ish years, doing exactly what it was written to do. And if the data protocol changes I will just drop 10-ish lines of code and write new 10-ish lines of weird looking, compact and efficient code. I never care understanding my code. If i ever read it again it's just to have a "wow, what does this even do" moment at my own code. For me, write-only is a feature. >Perl can be used nearly as a shell replacement for very quick scripting. Yet there is no generally available shell (like Bash or zsh) written in Perl. This is a weird thing I'm still trying to cope with in 2023. It may be because the term "shell replacement" is used wrong. Did you mean "shell programming"? >Perl has a small set of core syntax and is very extensible and flexible in adopting new paradigms. ... I don't know. 27 years later, I still like to flex my reptilian brain reading perlsyn manpage. I like to think of perl syntax as a set of loose rules which you can bend to your liking. And the things you can come out with... oh, boy. Perl is good tool for coming up with a solution really quick. And most of the times, you will just keep running that code for ten-ish years to come.
Also, Perl is more of a philosophy than a programming language, like Forth is. Its biggest disadvantage was the community itself. They just kept using it wrong, over and over, trying to serve the greed of a corporate world. The proof of this is Perl 6, the community rewrite of Perl. Looks cool. Won't use it. I think that's why it's now mostly referred to as "raku" instead of "Perl 6". It's not a Perl. |
> History shows different. Perl was never designed for this.
I beg to differ - after all, what was Perl 5 about? Adding objects and modules were features only needed for large programs. Just looking at CPAN shows numerous modules of significant size and complexity.