Why do people like Perl?

I see lots of people being super happy with Perl, but I don't understand.
What does make Perl so enjoyable to those people ?
I mean, there isn't even arguments to functions

Comments

[Lorenzo Pasqualis]

They like it because it is comfortable to them; they have learned to use it and know they can solve problems with it. They have the tools handy, they are familiar with the libraries and can get going quickly on any project using it.

It has to do with confirmation bias and normalcy bias. You tend to stick with what you know, appreciate and defend stuff you invested a bunch of time on, and resist change.

With every language under the sun, you'll find a range of emotions going from blind love to absolute hatred. It's like for all technologies. Some people love PCs, others hate them. Some people love iPhones, others prefer Android. The debate is almost pointless, as it has to do with emotions and personal attachment more than anything else.

[Hans Christian Rudolph]

Being able to hack together a quick solution in Perl is just pure joy to me! While I haven't used Perl for any big, long-term software projects -- it probably wouldn't be my language of choice for these purposes -- I believe there is great value in having such a tool for quick-n-dirty scripts that you might only need temporarily, e.g. for test data creation. In that sense, Perl can be the most efficient language IMHO. Plus, I still think that it provides the best experience when working with regular expressions.

[Dave Cridland]

While I was at university - so about 20 years ago now - I did a fair amount of Perl. Perl was the scripting language, to the point where if you said you were writing a script, it was taken as read that you meant Perl. It was great at hacking out quick and often dirty solutions to problems. It was the language of choice of the sysadmin. Yet even then, it was well known as a "write-only" language, and generally looked down upon by "real" programmers.

But for sysadmins, it was awesome. Don't compare it to Python, or C++, though - compare it to Bash, Awk, and Sed. These were its progenitors, not C. And it beat them hollow. It was written as, and excels as, a glue language.

Perl programmers went in two directions. Some, like me, drifted onto other language choices, as things like Python grew to handle some of the space Perl occupied, and Bash itself grew better. Sysadmins turned into DevOps and got tooling like Ansible and so on.

Others focussed on trying to modernise the language with ever more modules in CPAN, and ever more language features built on the byzantine nest of references and blessings that makes up Perl.

[Josh Cheek]

Love this answer! It's worth noting that Ruby stole enough from Perl, that most of what people would use Perl to script, Ruby does just as well.

[Halt! 6 kere 9?]

Do they?

[Monsieur Cellophane]

"There isn't even arguments to functions". This is so wrong in so many dimensions.

[Doshirae]

What I meant was that, by default, you don't have signatures to functions, only the @_ array

[James R Grinter]

Last I checked, neither does standard JavaScript, but that’s not held it back.

I write a lot of Java these days, but I still write some Perl (and, depending upon the problem to be solved, and the situation in which it needs to run, shell scripts and PHP) and some JavaScript too.

Picking the right language for the task at hand is something you learn with experience, IMHO.

[Kyle Stratis]

Many scripting languages don't. Most Python projects use **kwargs to not have to enforce specific function arguments.

[Blaž Šelih]

It has been a while since I did any real work in Perl, but there is one thing I really miss in (most?) other languages. That is regular expressions built right into the core of the language.

[ComputerSmiths]

I used to code amost exclusively in Perl, primarily because of CPAN. You could find anything on CPAN. Now I use almost exclusively Python, because Raspberry Pi, and you can find almost anything with Google on Pip or Stack Exchange or ...

[Steve Bertrand]

I wrote and published WiringPi::API and RPi::WiringPi specifically so myself and others can use their favourite language (Perl) on the Raspberry Pi.

At work I code in Python, but Perl has, and always will be my favourite language.

[Valentin Baca]

| What does make Perl so enjoyable to those people ?

If you ask this question to N people, you will get N answers (protip: this applies to most things).

| There isn't even arguments to functions

Not true. It's just packaged differently.

Like others have pointed out, more modern languages like Python and Ruby got to learn from Perl's design and "mistakes"

Compared to other languages, Perl is old (aka 'mature' aka 'crusty' depending on your attitude).

What that translates to is:

• Supports many methodologies. You can just script or you can build a complex OO package.
• Many, many packages. Python and Javascript may have an explosion of new packages, but they're all playing catch-up with Perl
• Ubiquity. It's on and runs nearly every machine.

Sure the language has warts, it's as old as I am!

I'd highly recommend the book "Learning Pearl". It really gives a solid introduction to the language. Granted Perl is pretty unreadable at first, but so is {C, Objective-C, Haskel} until you learn {C, Objective-C, Haskel}.

[scottanderson42]

Quick note on "many, many packages": by what metric are you gauging this?

Also, my favorite Perl book is the "Perl Cookbook" - definitely not for learning from scratch, however.

[Valentin Baca]

modulecounts.com/

[Theo van Hoesel]

interesting that it counts distributions, rather than modules... 35,933 vs 194,343, which would have it put on par with Java. I hate statistics and numbers, they somewhat tend to tell you a lie all the time

[Thorsten Hirsch]

People being super happy with Perl? That must be Perl 6. ;-)

[Dr Rev J Kirchartz]

I always loved computers, tried hacking QBasic games on my dad's old IBM clone, so when I was in my early teens I decided to try to learn Perl. I got one of those "mastery in 24 hours"-type books from the library, and I remember crying because I'd "never be a real programmer." Nothing made any sense. Since then I kept trying, kept learning, batch scripts, C++, html/case/JavaScript, added ColdFusion, then PHP, BASH scripts, Python, Ruby, Node. Recently I tried again to learn Perl, it's infinitely easier now that I have a stronger grasp of programming concepts. CPAN is a fantastic precursor to PIP, NPM, Yarn - following the Hacker Ethos developed at MIT & Standard, sharing well developed code between hackers to keep making improvements and make programming easier. Without Perl some of these later languages would've never been made. (*cough*PHP*cough*) I've enjoyed finally picking up from my earlier failure.

PS. Arguments are passed to Perl functions in arrays you have to unpack, sure it's a little different, but each language has its quirks.

[Lance Wicks]

For me it's the ability to write code that reads more like prose.

It's a language that lets me express my ideas as I want to.

[Joel Berger]

Many people dislike Perl and like their competitors (especially Python) because it is so flexible. They prefer a language to rigidly enforce certain paradigms. As a corollary to that precept they also tend to only use core language functionality, because this tends toward consistency with other users of that language.

Perl on the other hand values flexibility, often allowing several ways to accomplish the same task. The user is encouraged to model the problem in the way they like to think about it, not in the way that the language (or more explicitly the language designer) wants you to think about it. This will often mean that in order to completely understand the code written by someone else you will need to have a firm grasp of the language since they may choose to use some other functionality than is your preferred mechanism.

Neither of these is wrong however they are very different.

Given that mentality of Perl, the core language often is sparse around high level features. A newcomer will come to Perl and be surprised at the lack of subroutine signatures or object oriented programming sugar. Both appear to be quite low level. An experience Perl programmer however will know that the core is spartan to allow the users to come up with their solutions to the problem and share them on CPAN, and we have.

I see even on this very thread a comment both about how Perl's CPAN is huge and second to none, and then a retort linking to a site that tracks the number of modules available by language. While I would never say that all the modules on CPAN are top notch, I think a much higher percentage are than in those other languages with skyrocketing numbers of modules available. Perl users prototype their language on CPAN. Core Perl is considering adding signatures to functions natively, there is an experimental implementation, and yet some of the sticking points center on how to support the favor features of several different systems available on CPAN. In the meantime users continue to use those CPAN modules that think like they do.

There are many high quality modules that do signatures or OO. In fact we are quite proud of our OO systems on CPAN. Moose and its derivatives (see Moo are incredibly powerful declarative object systems, the envy of anyone who takes the time to understand them. You might be surprised by what is possible: see for example Moops or Dios.

[Juan Julián Merelo Guervós]

It's relatively simple, similar to other languages so learning was easy (when I did it 25 years) and it's simply a very fast way of fulfilling your data processing or web needs.

[Kyle Stratis]

We do people feel the need to make troll posts about languages they've probably never touched? I like it because it's easy to read at a quick glance (I love sigils) but you can also use it to compete in code golf competitions. It's easy to quickly run and comes with most OSs. It processes huge volumes of data very quickly, and that's what I use it for in my job. String manipulation is still blazing fast, and its flexibility is second to none.

[Dave Jacoby]

use feature qw{ signatures } ;
no warnings qw{ experimental::signatures } ;

sub shorten ( $string ) {
    $string =~ s{(https?://\S+)}{ makeashorterlink( $1 ) }gmixe ;
    return $string ;
    }

But really, once you internalize it, is there really much difference between that and this?

sub shorten {
    my $string = shift @_ ;
    $string =~ s{(https?://\S+)}{ makeashorterlink( $1 ) }gmixe ;
    return $string ;
    }

I recall that in C, you can have it so that you have separate functions for shorten(), shorten(string), shorten(integer), shorten(string,string,string), etc., but that's striking me as a huge violation of DRY. I'm willing to be schooled on the point, though.

There is much to like about Joel Berger's response. I know Joel, and I like Joel. But then, I know Perl and I like Perl. B)

There's also something to Lorenzo Pasqualis' answer.

My coding journey started with C and C++, but as a student employee working with web, it struck me that writing string manipulation code in C was a nightmare, and when I started learning Perl, I saw it as godsend for the tasks at hand.

Beyond that, from the beginning, it fit my brain. I could write pseudocode for a problem and Perl could usually run it. And since then, for fun and for work, I have spent years writing Perl that fits my brain and learning things that make my brain fit Perl.

(I really think that the idea most people have of Perl is based on Matt's Script Archive. With the introduction of Modern Perl, Higher-Order Perl, perltidy and Perl::Critic, the standard for Perl has gotten better since the 1990s, but even by the standards of 1990s, Matt's Script Archive had really bad Perl code.)

With Perl, you get CPAN, which is an incredible source of pre-invented wheel, with the option to use or ignore as necessary. For example, there are quite a number of ways to get CLI arguments in Perl, but it's rare that Getopt::Long doesn't do everything I need.

To contrast, there exists Text::Levenshtein to tell the distance between add and zdd (useful to suggest changes if you accidentally type git zdd README.md) but an independent implementation exists in perlbrew, where they assume you don't have the module and you don't have admin privileges.

I can't say there's nothing I'd want to do that I can't do in Perl, but where I can't, it's either far outside the niche where Perl lives -- Windows is doable, mostly, I think Android is theoretically possible and inside the browser would be weird -- or I just haven't learned enough to make it work. All my interaction with the FitBit API had been with Python, and once they moved to OAuth2, I haven't been able to make anything work.