hi, i was interested if perl is still relevant in this day and age. Perl has been on the decline for a very long time now. Perl 6 (now named 'raku) not being backwards compatible with perl 5 code made the already small perl community even smaller by splitting it in half. A good example is lisp with it’s thousands of different dialects.

Is it still worth using or is it bound to legacy software forever? Like cobol.

  • Kazumara@feddit.deEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    unexpected bits of flexibility

    The worst one I stumbled across while reading a colleagues script was the three separate namespaces for symbols of type scalar, array, and hash.

    • dan@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      You mean the fact that you can have a hash called %foo, an array called @foo and a scalar called $foo all at the same time? I agree that’s a weird choice and there’s potential for insanity there, but it’s pretty easy to just not do that…

      20+ years of Perl experience and while Perl has a load of idiosyncrasies that make it harder to work with than other languages, I don’t think that particular one has ever caused a significant problem.

      • Kazumara@feddit.deEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        You mean the fact that you can have a hash called %foo, an array called @foo and a scalar called $foo all at the same time?

        Yes, exactly. Those definitions aren’t clashing, so they must have separate namespaces.

        it’s pretty easy to just not do that…

        I wouldn’t do that either, but my colleage apparently did. So far I’m having a harder time reading perl than writing it.