Perl is a language I wanted to try since I really like regexps and I liked AWK, but having learned Python first, it seems like a backward movement. On social media and forums, you constantly see lots of opinions warning about Perl and the lots of warts in a language that tries to be backward compatible and embraces TMTOWTDI. I was tempted to try Raku instead but Raku is more niche and not preinstalled on most Linux distros.
A Perl 7 with better defaults could be the right thing to make people like me start experimenting with the language.
Perl has a bad reputation as a result of people writing completely incomprehensible one liners but I’ve come across several Perl codebases that were very readable by someone who didn’t know the language. It also has some nice features like taint tracking built into the language.
Perl is a language I wanted to try since I really like regexps and I liked AWK, but having learned Python first, it seems like a backward movement. On social media and forums, you constantly see lots of opinions warning about Perl and the lots of warts in a language that tries to be backward compatible and embraces TMTOWTDI. I was tempted to try Raku instead but Raku is more niche and not preinstalled on most Linux distros.
A Perl 7 with better defaults could be the right thing to make people like me start experimenting with the language.
I use
perlfor one-liners (whenawkfalls short, for example regex features like lookarounds, builtin functions likegrep,join, etc).For longer scripts, I use Python.
Perl has a bad reputation as a result of people writing completely incomprehensible one liners but I’ve come across several Perl codebases that were very readable by someone who didn’t know the language. It also has some nice features like taint tracking built into the language.