Why Perl? (two-wrongs.com)

submitted 1 year ago by fouc@lemmy.world to c/programming@beehaw.org

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[-] breadsmasher@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Is perl really

It is installed by default everywhere

No hate i’m just surprised

[-] fouc@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

It's a dependency of a lot of things, including git, lxc, GNU autotools. Check the Required By on the Archlinux repo.

[-] projectazar@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

Based solely off the implications of this post, it seems Perl is installed default on most Linux distros and MacOS, but not Windows. https://www.perl.com/article/downloading-and-installing-perl-in-2021/

[-] pec@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

Not sure about the scaling part

I have work on a large application using perl and the readability and maintability where horrendous. The performance where surprisingly good enough (millionsn of request a day); although switching to go (direct translation without any refactoring or usage of fancy go features) yield huge gains in latency and memory usage.

I have work with go, PHP, java, and JavaScript on large application and they all way better than perl. Not even comparable.

[-] boot@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah perl really fails when it comes to maintainability. If you ever write any perl and the requirements change over time (they almost certainly will in a professional setting), you have to pretty much be willing and able to throw it away and start over or accept your fate of wasting unnecessary hours. I'd never advocate for building systems in perl, because nobody wants to come back and modify some buggy piece of code when it's so unreasonably unreadable. If you want to write some perl for your home automation system, be my guest. Please don't use it in a situation where I grab a bug fix ticket, open the code, and find a pile of dollar signs and ampersands staring back at me.

[-] orclev@lemmyrs.org 2 points 1 year ago

Before there was python, before there was node, there was perl. It's old, it's crufty, it's a product of a bygone age, but even today if you want to do something with regular expressions and ingesting text it's still one of the easiest options. Of course it's highly debatable if you should ever use regex to ingest text.