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from the There’s-more-than-one-way-to-do-it,-but-sometimes-consistency-is-not-a-bad-thing-either dept.
Ruth Holloway at Red Hat's marketing site, OpenSource.com, has a retrospective on three decades of perl covering some history and a few of the top user groups. The powerful and flexible scripting language perl turns 30 at the end of this year. It is a practical extraction and reporting language widely used even today and has a dedicated community. It's ease of use and power made it the go-to tool through the boom of the 90's and 00's when the WWW was growing exponentially. However, its flexible syntax, while often an advantage, also functions as a sort of Rorschach test. One that some programmers fail. Perhaps two of its main strengths are pattern matching and CPAN. The many, mature perl modules available from CPAN make it a first choice for many when needed to draft something quickly or deal with a quick task.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday October 12 2017, @11:03AM (1 child)
I find I have to RTFM more broadly every 4-5 years when an occasion arises to write more perl in bulk, because in between I mostly use it as a glue-/scripting language and there's a bit of a palimpsest effect that sets in after using other languages.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday October 12 2017, @11:24AM
Odd. Works the opposite for me. The more languages I make myself proficient in, the better I get at perl. But then I've clocked enough perl time that I couldn't forget it if I tried.
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