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Discussion on: Why do people like Perl?

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LorenzoTa • Edited

I like Perl, well I truely love it!

while this love can be a matter of abitude I never found, in ~20 years, a motivation to leave it or to use something else to accomplish my tasks.

One of first Perl's motto it's still valid and explains much of this love:

Making Easy Things Easy and Hard Things Possible

This is damn true! when you know Perl you can vary from oneliners to complex applications using many modules, classes and and obejects.

While Perl is no more the top laguage that was around 2000, it's vitality was not affected: many new projects gave new fresh blood to it: PSGI/Plack for the web dev part with frameworks like Mojolicious and Dancer2 to build modern web appliations, a major release each year in last 7 years: see them with the sisters realeses of strawberryperl rich distros for Win32 systems.

ModernPerl book it's a fresh look to the language.

Among new projects I'd like to add MCE Many-Core Engine for Perl abrstracting parallelization and bringing it to Linux, MacOS and windows: want you to run your perl on 200 cores? You can!

Some more features that make me love Perl are:

  1. Perl is extremely expressive with a very high signal/noise ratio
  2. CPAN ~200.000 modules at your disposal
  3. a woderful and qualified community: ask at perlmonks if you have a simple or a complex question
  4. Perl it's a glue language and run everywhere. P stands for practical
  5. Perl made a big effort to support unicode: you have to work around it but it's not a Perl problem: unicode it's difficult itself
  6. best regex implementation you can find: extended in recent releases to bring to you an incredible power
  7. with Perl you get your job done, quickly and Perl does not force you to write code in it's manner: choice your style: TMTOWTDI
  8. Perl has a full featured testing ecosystem
  9. it has a wonderful error reporting system
  10. Perl is fun! If you want you can introspect the language itself playing black magic with the symbol table, 'eval' puts the compiler at your disposal at runtime, perl has obfusacations, oneliners, golf and poetry if you want to have fun

See also this post on perlmonks to see other opinions.

L*