Over the past 10-12 years, Perl has been getting some significant speed boosts, on the order of 30% overall. It is of course still a very slow language when compared to compiled languages, but I'll take it.<p><a href="https://blogs.perl.org/users/dimitrios_kechagias/2022/11/perl-performance-evolution-over-the-last-decade.html" rel="nofollow">https://blogs.perl.org/users/dimitrios_kechagias/2022/11/per...</a><p>I still code in Perl a fair bit for work. One great improvement I have taken advantage of is subroutine arguments, rather than unpacking @_ at the head of each subroutine. It is much easier to tell what the sub expects, and if the caller passes the wrong number of args it is a compile time error.<p>The main draw for me is that regex is built into the syntax of the language, and not a library. If the task requires a lot of pattern matching and string manipulation and speed isn't that critical, I reach for Perl.
perl has the distinction of being designed by a linguist and, for many coders (like me), it has a very smooth and easy feeling …<p>… others dislike the idea of $ sigils as “noun” markers and @ sigils to denote plurals but imo these features trick your brain into engaging these natural language concepts.<p>In contrast, I feel that Java is “heavy”, Python is “sciency” and so on.<p>The other distinctive aspect of perl is that it does not seek to constrain and block the coder. Strongly typed and opinionated languages (like Rust and Haskell) can be frustrating since they force you to code their way. That’s fine - it’s in the contract. perl is for when you just want a bag of tools to get the job done without becoming a wrestling match.<p>This flexibility also means that non standard code is easier to write in perl. The tool gets a bad reputation at the hands of poor coding practices. A higher level of trust and self-discipline is needed.<p>perl6 - now renamed to www.raku.org, continues the spirit with a cleaned up syntax and a lot more features in the core language
I like perl. Before, I had written a toy web server in perl (it was fun and I learned a lot), then I ported it to cosmopolitan to have it run everywhere!<p>This year I've written a fdisk replacement in perl, to make hybrid MBR+GPT for bootable media.<p>First, I wanted to check how they were made, but then I decided I wanted to programmatically write hybrid MBR in a way that's easier than gdisk and that offers more control that xorriso.<p>It's not complete yet, but the partition reading feature was already very helpful to understand the ins and out of the mfg59 layout that's so popular for optical media, and the final gpt tweaks should only take a few more days.<p>perl allowed me to write it very quickly and to make sure it will work reliably for the years to come.
Man. I really wish we didn't have language discrimination. Perl is just so fast to write and has such a sizeable ecosystem of modules, and such great docs, that I can produce any program in Perl faster than I can write it in Python, purely because it's more expressive in a smaller space and has fewer restrictions. But no team I'll ever be on in my life will agree to work with me on a Perl project, because everyone just "knows" Perl is taboo. People laugh at me when I suggest using it.
The very short format is useful for reminders of what is possible, flagging features that I'd skipped over when they first came out (iterating over multiple values at a time, i.e. a hash in a foreach loop). You need to go elsewhere to get the significance of new features to the language, such as "class" or subroutine signatures.<p>It's the best format of reference I've seen for the times I'm asking myself what's the minimum version of Perl needed for this bit of code and what becomes available when ops upgrades the production server.
Perl5 it's like merging an enhanced ksh, easier awk and less difficult sed in a single tool.
It can do the same exact thing as the previous three but with less headaches.
Except acting as an interactive shell as sh does, OFC.
Also with CPAN you have lots of nice tools out there.
Perl's still got a special place in my heart, but honestly, I don't use it much these days. I mainly bring it out when I'm processing a lot of text or writing scripts to be used by Perl-savvy teammates.<p>But here's a cool thing - in coding interviews for non-SWE roles (I'm in security), when they say 'pick any language', I go straight for Perl. Why? Because it's very forgiving when prototyping a solution quickly, has great data-structures without a lot of setup (auto-vivification!), built in grep and map features, etc.
10 Years ago there was the so called Perl Renaissance.
Which should turn Perl around. Sad truth is.
People already moved on.
Everything to little to late and not what the people where looking for.
In tables without borders and/or margins, you can never tell where each feature starts or if there’s one or two of them when the text wraps. Not sure what drives people to use tables at all for title:content or feature:description lists.
Hmmm, I haven't looked at Perl in ten years and my day-to-day for the past seven years has been Python with occasional Java. I was a fan, but now I don't miss Perl.