Perl

“I still love Perl5, still use it in one-liners all the time, and still code up quick CLI tools with it.”

“The Perl community has placed a high value on backward compatibility, allowing older code to continue functioning”

“it doesn't struggle with escaping the way bash does, and it has very powerful text processing abilities”

“Perl was excellent when everything was text... but when things started being XML or JSON or whatever, less so.”

“Perl has very efficient minimal syntax, with "Perl golf" training set it is almost like ascii bytecode for LLMs.”

“everything from HTTP clients, TLS and JSON are all builtin which makes it a very stable and easy way to replace what I would normally have implemented in shell scripts”

“perl is considered write-only because it is a mess of features that allow unhygienic programming habits to flourish”

“that's because if you don't have a paradigm of thought, you are not likely to reach for a tool that works there.”

“Perl’s alien syntax and how there were multiple competing “best practices” put off newcomers and made it difficult to code review.”

“Perl is also easier to use and deploy than python and ruby, as upgrades don't break your scripts and dependencies.”

“Perl and VMS were awesome in their original home fields, but were not quick to, or even able to, capitalize on the new directions”

“it worked great for ME but when I started interacting with other people's perl code, it all broke down”

“Perl has huuuge impact on so many other languages, including JavaScript, that its place in the hall of fame cannot ever be disputed.”

“A fantastic approach and ecosystem—just one overtaken by a world that was moving on to a different set of desires and values.”

“Perl was clearly unfit for this perfect future with its proud selection of 4 or 5 implementations of OOP, and it hurt the language promotion a lot.”

“Perl 5 is to me a classic scripting language (as opposed to an actual programming language), for both good and bad.”

“a pretty awful language; hard to read, implicit, inconsistent, uncomfortable to write due to all the special characters”

“trying to learn to code from reading other peoples perl scripts was way harder than the (then) newer language alternatives”

“Perl is extremely expressive, which is amazing for one-off scripts, and awful for code that's meant to be shared”

“Perl and access to copilot have really helped me out. I don't love Perl but I'm damn glad I have access to it.”

“There are too many ways to do things in perl because of the various flavors / takes on how to do things.”

“It actually was the one thing you said it wasn't - a good practical general language at least within web and sysadmin worlds.”

“Perl culture was too much about craft-mastery which ended up being at odds with most corporate cultures.”

“Or even worse: my($f) = `fortune`; # assigns first line of output to $f. my $f = `fortune`; # assign all output to $f.”

“It has many of the required structures (hashes/maps, ad hoc structs, etc) and is great for knocking up a rough and ready prototype of something.”

“I can still look at crazy object oriented perl meta-programming stuff I wrote 20 years ago, and figure out what it's doing”

“There's already a language that provides all the features of awk plus modern language conveniences, and is available on every system you can think of.”

“Perl is most human-like programming language, which is what makes it great, but also what makes it unreliable for large scale programming.”

“The benefit of having a single language with all of the functionality of these tools was amazing at the time”

“Perl's docs are so unusually good that newcomers can't believe they don't need the internet to find clear answers”

“grab some line noise from perl and you would first need something to translate it into idiomatic text”

“Its "write only" reputation was well-deserved - the original author of a non-trivial Perl program might be able to maintain it, but once a team is involved, forget it.”

“I'll just write it in the same perl I used regularly as far back as 1998... but it never goes further than that”

“the community was smaller, fractured by Perl 6 and dominated by some ahem divisive characters which made it intimidating for newcomers”

“Perl actually had this as well with Perl 5. You could specify the version of the perl file and work from there.”

“Perl remained (and remains!) eminently useful in its original domain of Unix system automation glue and ad-hoc text analysis.”

“Perl's strength is that it was really good and quick and dirty one-offs, especially with text manipulation.”

“It's definitely more powerful and has less foot guns than bash, the problem is the stigma is worse than bash.”

“Perl is powerful, expressive, and cryptic. Its popularity faded during a time when the popular trend of programming languages was towards simplicity and legibility.”

“If you know perl and have a whole host of utils from a unix box, you can script the workflow you want quite easily”