[nukem222]

Notably, they forgot to improve on readability and maintability, both of which are markedly worse with perl.

Look I get people use the tools they use and perl is fine, i guess, it does its job, but if you use it you can safely expect to be mocked for prioritizing string operations or whatever perl offers over writing code anyone born after 1980 can read, let alone is willing to modify.

For such a social enterprise, open source orgs can be surprisingly daft when it comes to the social side of tool selection.

Would this tool be harder to write in python? Probably. Is it a smart idea to use it regardless? Absolutely. The aesthetics of perl are an absolute dumpster fire. Larry Wall deserves persecution for his crimes.

[sgarland]

Did you miss the post a few above yours, where an author of this tool explained why it’s written in Perl? Introducing a new language dependency for a build, especially of an OS, is not something you undertake lightly.

[nukem222]

Right. Good luck finding people who want to maintain that. It just seems incredibly short-sighted unless the current batch of maintainers intend to live forever.

[sgarland]

Counterpoint: if someone knows Perl, they are much more likely to have the requisite skills to be a maintainer for a distro. It’s self-selection.

Imagine the filtering required for potential maintainers if they rewrote the packaging to JS.