Perl still relevant in 2023/24?

It0m@lemmy.ml to Technology@lemmy.world – 65 points –

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.

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Writing legible Perl code is the complete antithesis of what the language was created for. This comment shows a complete misunderstanding of Larry Wall’s work.

Lol what are you talking about?! What is this LW's point you're referring to? "Write non-readable code, everyone"?

I'm guessing you're referring to him saying "there's more than one way to do things", and that's not mutually exclusive from writing legible code.

There’s an obfuscated C contest too - no one ever assumed that K&R opposed highly legible code. I seem to recall that Kerrigan actually wrote some books to the contrary.

That's a non-argument, man. You just linked to a contest.

That's like saying that the FAA endorses unsafe airplane building practices because they hold a contest about unmanned cardboard made planes that fly the most length in a desert without crashing.