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by lsiebert
4667 days ago
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Perl isn't a flavor of the moment language, and can do everything you say, plus sees a lot of use in bioinformatics and linguistics. It's a mature language that predates python. As for a lot of good libraries, Python's PyPI has 34665 packages to CPAN's 124,546 modules. And it's community is well known for it's helpfulness and humility, perhaps because of the character of it's creator. Most modern dynamic programming languages owe a debt to Perl, and the modern web certainly does. It has a variety of modern frameworks:
Catalyst
Dancer
Mason
Maypole
Mojolicious
Cyclone 3 I'd say Catalyst and Mojolicious are the one's I've heard about most. Perl may not be considered as cool as Python by some, and there are reasons you can criticize it, but it's not any of the reasons you gave. |
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By "flavor of the moment", I was not referring to Perl, but rather to all the "compiles-to-JS" type stuff.
Merely comparing package repository sizes is not any indicator of quality or future prospects. Once you're beyond a few tends of thousands of packages, the bases are basically covered.
The biggest ding against Perl is the readability and maintainability. For scientific and data analytics oriented code, generally written by non-programmers who do not understand good software development process, Perl is frequently way too much rope.
Coolness has nothing to do with Python's popularity. (Unlike e.g. Rails which soared to popularity as a "Non-Java" way to do web apps, and then became a bit of a victim of its own success.) The scientific Python people I know all moved to Python from Matlab, C, and Perl because it made them more productive.