Good Reasons to Use Perl in 2021

Perl 5 still dominates as the most powerful terminal scripting language on the planet. It is the only language with \p{Lu} Unicode support. It was never meant for large scale applications, let alone the entire f*ing Web. The fact that Perl held up as well as it did is a testament to its solid stability and undeniable power. Perl still has a variety of benefits over all other languages, just don't write anything you'd call an "application" in it (and stay the hell away from anything but Perl 5).

[@CARPB147]

It's been said that "Perl is like sex. If you've had it, you can't live without it. If you haven't, you don't know what the fuss is all about." The statement is especially true if you really know it and have used it to solve real problems. A casual user that's written less than 10 scripts is not qualified to comment on its true usefulness or value proposition.

[@mintcar]

I've recently learned Awk and it took only two major uses to hit all the pain points that seem to have inspired the creation of Perl. On the surface it seems weird that I wasn't recommended it from the start. It's not like any of these problems are new. Anyway I came to KZbin to hear some reasons for using Perl, and all I found were videos about how much it sucked. But when I watched those videos the argument was "you will not get a job writing it". Why do people talk like you can only ever know 3 languages at once? All I want to do is replace Awk with something that has a more familiar and consistent way of writing regex, does it suck at that? You had the only video on the subject that was useful to me so thanks.

[@rwxrob]

I fucking love this comment. People don't know why Perl was created in the first place.

[@boelwerkr]

What i love about Perl is that i can trust the interpreter to run my code. To run it over 20 versions of the interpreter without changing one line. In other languages i have to touch the code every so often because an update of the interpreter breaks something, or the Version i used isn't supported anymore and i have to rewrite nearly everything. As one example. I wrote an backup system for a company 20 years ago in Perl. Since then they moved it from system to System. They replaced it briefly last year, then asked me if i could do some adaption to my code. And this is the same over many of my Perl projects. I don't have to rewrite or fix sudden broken code. It's given that i would code things differently today, but I'm not forced to do it.

[@subnumeric]

I always knew perl for those nifty one-liners, it seemed daunting, but I had respect for it. While it's my love, I recently ran out off steam on a project with AWK, so I figured it's time to learn perl. Angry KZbin webdevs aside, I actually tried to measure the overhead with a simple "time ( echo | $program '' )" for gawk, perl -e and perl -E. Result? gawk was roughly as fast as "perl -E" and ~2x slower than "perl -e". I did not expected, considering the binary sizes, but it actually is very fast. Also, OpenBSD had, has, and most likely will have perl for a long time. Btw, I'm 20, I think it might make you happy to hear that I like such things : )

[@AsherMancinelli]

This video makes me very happy. It’s almost asmr in a weird way

[@andrewbreeden3091]

It has a Bob Ross quality to it 😂❤

[@cpakkala]

Couldn't agree more. Perl is highly misunderstood and underappreciated by the young. Practical Extraction and Reporting Language; text manipulation people...The perfect glue language for Unix, which is all about text, the universal interface. By the way, zsh has associative arrays.

[@vladimirnechaev5870]

Raku (formerly Perl 6) features parallel execution with hyper and race functions. It also provides other mechanisms for concurrency in the scripts like futures, channels, reactive design. I used this parallelism for huge log files parsing (via hyper), parallel execution of folder compression and files parsing. This impressed me and I see no analogues in the other scripting languages. This is how, for instance, you might compress all the directories under "src" and place them to "dest": "src".IO.dir.race(batch => 1).map: { run 'tar', '-cjf', "dest/{.basename}.tar.gz", '-C', "$_", '.'; }

[@paultidwell8799]

Listening to you talk about this just made so much sense it was like wow. I never thought about that point. I had positive feelings towards PERL but I didn't know how to make the case for it.

[@konewayne]

Hey! I have never used Perl but I definitely want to give it a try this year. I am surprised for all the love it still receives from it's community. It is allways stupid to "hate" a tool or language. It could be useful or not for some particular task, but tu run a campaign against it is simply unprofessional and pathetic.

[@vilijanac]

I only program in perl. Use it for full blown webpage generation via cgi. Making it to render on any web server that accepts cgi. For me the benefit of this is that I can pack so much in on main.cgi file for all logic and location. Configuration, login and session handling, for that I wrote my own modules and use existing, to make it more readable. I don't have to go through 100 files and xml setup, to locate where is what.

[@CARPB147]

Excellent. For web pages, you can also try a framework like Catalyst (an MVC design), Mojolicious or others. I've used Catalyst and it is very effective.

[@RobbieHatley]

I program in several languages, because certain applications demand certain languages (autoit3 for automating Windows; C or C++ or Arduino Language for embedded programming; C + GMP for fast math; LSL for Second Life). At work I use mostly C and C++. But most of my home programming consists of writing CLI scripts for working with text, Unicode, and file systems, and for that, I use Perl almost exclusively.

[@JayeSpeaks]

Love your perspective! Thanks for the reminders on why I loved Perl, and should use it more on the CLI.

[@tompapiernik4187]

Excellent video. I’ve always thought-like the Camel-that Perl doesn’t mind insults as long as it’s still being used to do work. Ugly? Perhaps. Indispensable? You try crossing the desert without one.

[@dennisnaiden4747]

What is easier for serverside scripting and text modification, when things are not in your Hand and you have to adapt script: 20 line of Python Code or oneliner Perl?

[@gerardgauthier4876]

Most of the Perl haters are people who know very little Perl. Perl is a dense and 'sometimes' confusing language to the uninitiated.

[@CARPB147]

The loudest of the haters do indeed tend to be the ones that know it the least. Ignorance is loud. Perl can be written very elegantly. It can also be misused. Like any other language.

[@RobbieHatley]

Yes. Perl's _worst_ feature is its sigils ($@%&) and references (\). Perls _best_ feature is _also_ its sigils ($@%&) and references (\). Those are the hardest parts of the language to learn. But once one gets a handle on _those_ the rest of the language is easy. There comes a point where one asks one's self "Tell me again why I every bothered using a language _other than_ Perl???" Perl has become my default language for anything related to text, Unicode, or file systems. I've a whole mess of scripts I've written for my own personal data management (batch-renaming files, finding files, removing duplicate files, etc).

[@CARPB147]

@@RobbieHatley About the sigils, the "$" is exactly the same sigil for scalars that every Shell uses too, whether sh, bash, csh, tcsh, zsh, and the like. So no fault to Perl for that. Larry Wall explained the reasons for the choices well in his book Perl Programming. I never use the "&" sigil for subroutines. It's an old carryover that has been long unneeded. References to arrays or hashes are actually quite important and useful when passing or returning an array or a hash from subroutines, because it returns those structures as scalars and helps keep things modular and data local. Yes, Unicode handling has proven to be hugely useful in my journeys. To solve real problems. I've had to parse XML files with Japanese (Kanji and Katakana) data, translate transactions of different kinds into English, and load them into a SQL database. Single structured Perl script leveraging Unicode, regexes, and the database interface among many other things. Difficult things became possible very, very quickly. It was "ETL" code to interface several disparate multinational financial systems. Having written in over 25 programming languages in my career, nothing made that kind of work as seamlessly smooth as Perl did.

[@xseman]

we need more people like you

[@markmental6665]

im in college and i like perl a lot cause the syntax reminds me of c, kinda confused as to why people hate on it when its good for parsing large data

[@fennecbesixdouze1794]

On what planet is perl syntax anything remotely like C?

[@MrMeltdown]

@@fennecbesixdouze1794 cause you can write stuff in it that looks…. An awful lot like c (with sigils)

[@CARPB147]

@@fennecbesixdouze1794 - On planet Earth, Spartacus. How about curly braces and semicolons as statement operators rather than Python's lame reliance on whitespace where you can have two apparently identical programs where one works and the other throws errors? Like C, it also has a ternary operator that is more like C and Java than Python's. We could go on, but Perl was undeniably influenced by C. That is uncontested. Look it up.

[@johnjoyce]

heh. Apple has been using Perl nonstop since NeXT

[@muyvin98]

even today ?

[@lucasaraujo6.]

the only prototiping language for unicode regular expression matches se encontra entre c e shell the industry standard for back-end development Perl is in files that are running back end Common Gateway Interfaces Perl pack allows us to specify very precise binary notation, so you can parse binary file with Perl. Python isn't on Unix systems. Perl remains the best language where Regular expressions are concern and where any text manipulations or command line is concern. When Shell starts to get complicated. Shell scripting language

[@replikvltyoutube3727]

Good video. I guess I was wrong by deciding learning perl is bad. Every time I install Git and some other programs, I see perl packages installed as dependencies 😂

[@boogy4you]

there is one often overlooked perl asset which is Template::Toolkit! It's the mother of all templating systems! python templating sucks

[@VictorSanikovich]

Thank you

[@rwxrob]

You're welcome

[@Uncle_Moris]

thanks man, i alwase thing that any language have specyfic usage you show mi usage of PERL

[@pughums]

what I like about perl is that I think in it.

[@mcleanblades9234]

its strange stackexchange doesn't have a section for perl

[@RobbieHatley]

Yes, the Sewage Overflow family of web sites is "strange", yes. That's because it's run by a "Good Old Boys" club which hands out bad or good "karma" points based on the ego stroking of personalities rather than on merit of ideas and assertions. If they "don't have a Perl section", I'm actually glad; I'd rather my favorite language _not_ be besmirched by Sewage Overflow or its many variations ("Super Schmoozer", "Crap Exchange", etc, etc, etc). I'd rather seek answers to problems from other sources, such as Quora, Reddit, various other web forums, Usenet, etc.

[@ch0wderz912]

They bash on Perl because it's really good?? Well i'm glad I made my final decision on Perl

[@timhowe2968]

If anything, you are selling Perl short.

[@chrislawson7675]

What is "BSD"? OpenBSD still has perl in the base install and uses perl extensively in their own tooling. There is no such thing as just "BSD".

[@greenfloatingtoad]

The industry need to stop making technical decisions based on sexiness

[@computernerd8157]

Its based on how much moneyba company can make with the languange nothing more. If you want Perl to be the best, Make a product that sells billions and then coding boot camps will pop up trying to teach Perl of course assuming you own a company that changes the industry. However , if we just limit Perl to bash scripting that will never happen. Perl can be more than just a bash script replacement.

[@balaamsdonkey1524]

WE ARE ..........A SO CALLED OLD GUY.......AND PERL HAS BEEN ON OUR LIST TO USE IN A TEXT DRIVEN BUSINESS...OF ANALYSIS OF DOCUMENTS ...THE QUESTION........WHAT VERSION OF PERL DO WE PURCHASE OR DOWNLOAD ....VIA YOUR EXPERIENCE IN PERL SOFTWARE APPLICATIONS?????

[@MubashirullahD]

@11:23 I don't understand this line so do forgive but I feel a regex in python could do the same thing.

[@MubashirullahD]

Ah, I guess you know way more than I can even understand. I don't know Perl. I'll consider learning it if I go to cybersecurity. I got more interested in Go.

[@johnjoyce]

you’ve no idea how much better integration Perl (and Ruby) have with regular expressions

[@CARPB147]

@@MubashirullahD - Perl and Go are not mutually exclusive. Different sweet spots really.

[@lucasaraujo6.]

the idea of desert was good, but i'm not a native and the whispers are a problem.

[@johnjoyce]

long winded

[@CARPB147]

It admittedly starts annoyingly slow. Perhaps you can use CC and 2x playback speed, but what he says has much truth to it.

[@RobbieHatley]

That's one thing that I've never understood: when people call Perl "write-only". (I think that's what you were referring to at 2:17 when you say "read-only".) Really, there's only 2 reasons why a Perl program may look "write-only": 1. The person either never learned Perl or hasn't used it in years. 2. They're referring to a specific script which was either badly-written or deliberately-obfuscated (such as the script below). Otherwise, Perl tends to be one of the easiest programming languages to read (and to write), in my opinion. It continues to be my "default" language, if circumstances don't specifically dictate use of a different language instead. #! /bin/perl use bigint; my $n=9617996763795502534212842581842; my $m=-8;$_=$n&(0xff)=$m, print chr while(($m+=8)

[@CARPB147]

Good one, Robbie Hatley. 😁