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

[J L]

Why has no one here mentioned JavaScript? It is by far more popular than
virtually any language mentioned thus far (proof:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/793628/worldwide-developer-survey-most-used-languages/)
and you can run it on the server. When we talk about language usage,
popularity, and features we fall into a sort of trap. It is looking at the
problem from the wrong end. Let's look at Apple for a second.

Our usage numbers according to the previous link are on par with
Objective-C and about half of Swift, Apple's replacement for it. Apple's
current market cap is 2.6 Trillion dollars. This company uses two languages
that combined barely outpace Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications
(VBA). So one must admit that market dynamics do not match language usage
or this company should be doing far worse and have dropped these archaic
languages for far more popular alternatives.

I suspect that Apple is doing so well because they are laser focused on
delivering the best products they know how and using their own languages
simply makes sense. The focus is on delivering winning customer experiences
and making certain their tools help them do just that.

If Perl had made mistakes it has really been in the area of not
concentrating in this area. Consider Java. You get a .jar file and run Java
-jar funkyfile.jar and viola it runs. No additional downloads. No compile
steps. It runs. You get instant gratification and lots of it. I have spoken
to Apple users at length. They have no idea whatsoever how any of it works
internally. They don't care how it was written.

More products that people want and love is the answer as far as I can see.
I don't see that Perl needs more programmers to be successful. It needs
products and platforms that default to it.

On Sat, Apr 6, 2024, 8:53 PM Andy Lester <andy at petdance.com> wrote:

> 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
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