[Chicago-talk] What's happening with Perl these days

[Andy Lester]

I post this not with disdain for Perl, but with love and sadness.

The reason nobody is adopting Perl these days is that it is no longer the best at anything.

Years ago, yes, Perl did stuff you couldn't do anywhere else. Regexes built in! Huge library of code to use! Whip stuff up easy! Network connectivity! etc etc.  Now, everything that Perl used to do better than anyone else is standard in the language.

At this point, if you're starting a green field project, there's no case when you would say "Perl is the best choice to use."  I love Perl, and 20 years ago I pushed to migrate systems to Perl. Today, I think doing that would be malpractice.

At my day job, if I have to write code that doesn't need to use or interface with any of our tons of existing Perl code, I write it in Python.


>> Incidentally, I was helped immensely when my job, for a moment, was willing to fund training; I jumped to take an in-person course from David Beazley, a local who has written/co-written several Python books, including O'Reilly's Python Cookbook. (His site is https://www.dabeaz.com/)

I haven't taken David's classes, but I've loved his Python books all the way back to 1999.  https://www.amazon.com/Python-Essential-Reference-OTHER-RIDERS/dp/0735709017

Andy