This is a card in Dave's Virtual Box of Cards.

Perl

Created: 2023-01-20

Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister

Pluses:

Always there (on dang near every Unix box, it’s even part of the OpenBSD base system!)
Battle-tested
Fast enough
Does scale, despite what you may have heard
Has syntax that makes sense if you know shell and AWK

Minuses:

Absolutely bonkers in every other way

I can’t do better than Steve Yegge in Ancient Languages: Perl (sites.google.com). I echo his sentiments.

I loved Perl in the late 1990s. It was so much more fun and useful than anything I’d been exposed to before. And Perl was the way to write CGI programs for interactivity on the World Wide Web. I made my first Real Money as a Programmer with Perl.

But it has not aged well.

I hate to say it, even CPAN just isn’t a big deal in 2023.

I mean, the truth is, ruby ships with so much useful functionality in the standard library that I often don’t even need any additional packages.

Still, I’ll never forget all the good times with the Llama and Camel books.

Back to programming.