A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
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I spent a summer at a semiconductor company whose scripting language of choice was Perl. Truly, what the fuck…
Wall is a linguist, which influenced several of his design choices. You have a wide variety of expressing what you want in perl, just as with natural languages - some ways are maybe a bit harder to read for newcomers, while others are not worse than something like python. Typically you’d have coding guides for projects.
I did a webchat in perl in the 90s, and eventually rewrote it in php3 - php was easier to manage properly isolated between users than perl via the CGI interface, so it became popular with hosters very quickly. I went back to doing all my web scripting in perl once I started hosting my own servers,though.
Perl I believe is where the programming adage of TMTOWTDI comes from — There’s More Than One Way To Do It. Python was an anathema to that ideal, where TOOWTDI — There’s Only One Way To Do It, or at least one ideal way