Perl is a really great language that i came to love over the years.
First, I've been writing PHP stuff then moved to Perl and experienced Java,Actionscript,Javascript,Objective-C,Python...
But all of them, Perl was the most powerful and expressive language.
For those who learn Javascript, Perl object literal notation
should be really easy to get and if you do some jQuery stuff, many things should come naturally to you somehow. Perl supports packages, closure, utf8 since many years whereas they are just coming to PHP (It's a real pain to go back to PHP for some projects... as it looks like a huge trash of functions in the global namespace with no cohesion at all... working with array_, mb_ or preg_* functions is such a pain... hopefully the doc helps in understanding the quirks of the language).
The integration of regex as an operator is so nice.
q[] or qq[] helps quite a lot and I quickly miss them...
Controlling each instance of the program flow in code is very powerful too.
I guess the very minimalistic OOP system shipped with Perl did not help get Perl across the board of a wider range of company...
Obviously, this le/gend/ary image of unreadable code that one-liners, and to some extend sysadmin community, gave to the language has left a very bad taste in the mouth... and it is now very hard to get rid of.
when you look at http://mojolicio.us/ or http://perldancer.org/ for web development, Perl::Critic that analyzes your code for bad coding habits(JSLink like), perltidy that reformat your code to follow your conventions or Devel::NYTProf to profile every line of your code...
I don't even talk about CPAN that has always get the job done for me in like 90% of the case...
I still have to find a language that offers such a powerful ecosystem.
And for those who wonder, Perl is very active here in Japan.
Considering the amount of legacy Perl scripts that I have had to rewrite since I got
to Japan due to a lack of Perl developers that can mantain them,
I'd think that Japan's Galapagos argument does not work so much
in this case. I think that it is also losing strength around here.
It does not mean that Perl is not active in Japan though.
Many big companies in Japan uses Perl as the language of choice for their websites but indeed,I won't say that it's not loosing some market share though.
For those who learn Javascript, Perl object literal notation should be really easy to get and if you do some jQuery stuff, many things should come naturally to you somehow. Perl supports packages, closure, utf8 since many years whereas they are just coming to PHP (It's a real pain to go back to PHP for some projects... as it looks like a huge trash of functions in the global namespace with no cohesion at all... working with array_, mb_ or preg_* functions is such a pain... hopefully the doc helps in understanding the quirks of the language). The integration of regex as an operator is so nice. q[] or qq[] helps quite a lot and I quickly miss them... Controlling each instance of the program flow in code is very powerful too.
I guess the very minimalistic OOP system shipped with Perl did not help get Perl across the board of a wider range of company...
Obviously, this le/gend/ary image of unreadable code that one-liners, and to some extend sysadmin community, gave to the language has left a very bad taste in the mouth... and it is now very hard to get rid of.
when you look at http://mojolicio.us/ or http://perldancer.org/ for web development, Perl::Critic that analyzes your code for bad coding habits(JSLink like), perltidy that reformat your code to follow your conventions or Devel::NYTProf to profile every line of your code... I don't even talk about CPAN that has always get the job done for me in like 90% of the case...
I still have to find a language that offers such a powerful ecosystem.
And for those who wonder, Perl is very active here in Japan.