geekhack
geekhack Community => Other Geeky Stuff => Topic started by: dante on Fri, 06 January 2017, 21:36:18
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Just judging from the web/job sites everyone is balls deep into Python/R. There is still some Ruby hanging around and judging from employment sites is about neck and neck with Perl right now.
Does Perl have a future? If Java is the new Cobol of the business world will Python become the new Cobol of the scripting language world?
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Perl is dead. I'd stick to Java languages, CSS, PHP, Ruby is ok. People still like Python for some ****ing reason, beyond me, but it's popular.
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judging from the web/job sites
I'm sorry, but judging programming languages by job offers doesn't make sense.
Web development is very different from embedded-software development, which is completely different from data science, etc.
everyone is balls deep into Python/R
Data science folks are balls deep into Python/R. If you have Masters/PhD in statistics, there are chances you're using Python/R as a tool most of the time.
What does GH think of Perl? (Is it worth the time?)
Perl 5, or Perl 6?
If you dig into *nix systems, you'll find Perl 5 all over the place. It was a de facto standard in system administration for ages. In part thanks to its text-processing capabilities. In addition, there are tons of modules in CPAN. Speaking of that, Perl is also very popular in bioinformatics and some other fields, precisely because of existing libraries and text processing. It isn't going anywhere.
Now, Perl 6 is something completely new. Thus, it doesn't have the adoption. Only new projects may use it. That said, some people believe it's worth learning, because it potentially shows a lot about future programming languages. But you should also play with, for instance, Haskell, Smalltalk or Common Lisp for similar reasons.
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Perl 5 still is and will always be a very widely used language. It's ideal for text manipulation and for many other tasks.
Don't be scared by the fact that it's not the most widely used. It's been around for thirty years, and will be for many more.
It's a mature language, so tutorials and code posted on the internets - this is one of the elements evaluated by the tiobe index - aren't as numerous as more recent languages.
http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index//
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http://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/115851/is-perl-still-a-useful-viable-language
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I'm a systems engineer, and still use perl quite a bit. I have been using it since Perl 4, though, and if I were in a place where picking a "next language" made sense, I probably wouldn't pick it unless I were wanting to get in to bioinformatics or something similar, or were just interested.
It is great for text processing - really, nothing better. I use it a lot for quick and dirty one-offs, because it truly lives up to its name as the Swiss Army Chainsaw of languages and is really expressive, once you're used to it.
That said, for things that other people may end up maintaining, I tend to pick Python, just because that's where the industry is and I think it is kinda rude to leave potential language barriers to others to deal with.
If you're interested, give it a go. Once you get past the nonstandard syntax and some of the more line-noisey stuff (a fair bit of which you can ignore when you're learning), it is pretty easy, syntactically, with some fairly neat tricks. Another under-appreciated aspect of Perl is that, syntactically, it is really a hodgepodge/modernization of unix-heritage languages (C, sed, awk, parts of various shells). So it all tends to kind of make sense together, if you're in a place where you're dealing with the C/C++ part of the unix open source world, doing technical operations, etc.
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It's dead.