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

[Joel Berger]

There are some nice things about Python, Exceptions, context managers,
built-in set types. That said, I have have several occasions where pythons'
idiosyncratic ways of doing things meant something that should be easy was
instead hard because I couldn't think up the "one way" that python would
have wanted me to do it. Also Python's toolchain is an absolute nightmare.
Indeed if one thing keeps me from recommending writing new code in python,
its the toolchain (think module installers and environment management). It
really shows how much it matters that a language either get that stuff
right from the start (node, for the most part) or maintain it well
afterwards (Perl).

All that said, I have to say that for writing new code where I won't be the
only one working on it, I have to recommend node these days. Javascript and
node have really made strides in being a "real language" in the past 10
years and I feel like it has many things that feel very perl-ish to me.
Lexical variables, a similar closure model, etc, but with modern stuff like
async/await built in as a first-class feature of the language. I love Perl
and will use it for a long time, but we in the Mojo group have seen the way
the wind is blowing and have created a parallel development of Mojolicious
in node. I'm not saying Perl is dying, but I would recommend people to
hedge their bets.
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