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by rjurney 6228 days ago
Does it have Perl in the name? Then it may be great, but its not cool. The kids think it sucks. And if you don't care about the kids, then you don't care about the future.
2 comments

I don't like perl, for one reason or another we never got along. I respect the hell out of it though. Perl is so far from dead it's achieved complete success and become invisible.

A large amount of infrastructure at my workplace is written in (and much of it will continue to be written in) perl. Perl5 is sort of like vi, it'll probably be on whatever system you're logging into in some form or other.

One of my co workers is a Perl6 evangelist, to the point of caricature.

That may not be cool by your (or Reddit's or TechCrunch's or whatever) standards and it may very well never be as popular for writing the next big web app but but as one of the underpinnings of the internet it's cool by me.

Yeah, Perl 5 pays the bills. I code in it every day. I am most fluent in Perl. My point is that the long-delay of Perl 6 and the large volumes of crusty CGI code around has created an image problem.
CGI is filthy, sure. But being able to run your filthy hack of a config file parser on an unpatched HPUX box from circa 30,000 BC with no changes?

That's cool. Maybe not cool on the same axis as Rails and Twitter but cool nonetheless.

I choose to interpret this as a lovely ironic statement. Well done!