[CDBUG-talk] Perl (off-topic for BSD)

[Jaime]

Steve, your message really caught my attention.  Do you mind if I ask
a few questions?  I'd really be interested in what you could tell me,
as I work as a sysadmin (some scripting) and not a programmer.  I'd
really appreciate your perspective, if you would be willing to share
it.  My questions are inserted inline below.

> I used to share the write-only language viewpoint, having attempted to read
> my own code a few months later

I've found that any code I haven't looked at in a few months is
difficult to read in ANY language, unless its a relatively simple and
short chunk of code.  But most of my code is short.  I think the
longest was only a few hundred lines (including comments.)

Have you found that Perl is worse?


> I have learned a lot about more recent
> developments in Perl 5 that help in that regard.

I haven't really used much stuff that was newer than Perl 4.  What
have they done in Perl 5 to make this easier?


> Obviously Ruby and Python
> have grabbed most of the space that Perl once occupied, and the promise of
> Perl 6 badly stunted further growth.

I find that VERY interesting.  I usually use whatever I know well
enough to do what I need in a few dozen lines.  That is usually Bash
or Perl.  I don't really learn about what is becoming popular in the
field or why.

What areas did Perl occupy in the past?  Which ones have moved to Ruby
and which to Python?  Why did those languages become more popular?
I'd LOVE to learn more about this.


Jaime