Perl was pretty much first in the wave of interpreted languages from the late 80ies and 90ies. It set the bar on what to expect from such ecosystems.
But being the first meant it got some oddities and the abstractions are not quite right imho.
A bit too Shell-esque, specially for arguments passing and the memory abstractions are a bit too leaky regarding memory management (reference management fills too C-esque for an interpreted language, and the whole $ % @ & dance is really confusing for an occasional and bad Perl dev like me). The "10 ways to do it" also hurts it. It lead to a lack of consistency & almost per developer coding coding styles. The meme was Perl is a "write only language".
But I would still be grateful of what it brought and how influential it was (I jock from time to time how Ruby is kind of the "true" Perl 6, it even has flip flops!).
In truth, these days, I feel the whole "interpreted languages" class is on the decline, at least on the server. There are a lot of really great native languages that have come up within the last few years, enabled in large part by LLVM. And this trend doesn't seem over yet.
Languages like Rust, Swift, Go, Zig or Odin are making the value proposition of interpreted languages (lower perf but faster iterations) less compelling by being convenient enough while retaining performance. In short, we can now "have the cake and eat it too".
But the millions of lines in production are also not going awywhere anytime soon. I bet even Perl will still be around somewhere (distro tooling, glue scripts, build infra, etc...) when I retire.
Anyway, thank you Perl, thank you Larry Wall, love your quotes.
But being the first meant it got some oddities and the abstractions are not quite right imho.
A bit too Shell-esque, specially for arguments passing and the memory abstractions are a bit too leaky regarding memory management (reference management fills too C-esque for an interpreted language, and the whole $ % @ & dance is really confusing for an occasional and bad Perl dev like me). The "10 ways to do it" also hurts it. It lead to a lack of consistency & almost per developer coding coding styles. The meme was Perl is a "write only language".
But I would still be grateful of what it brought and how influential it was (I jock from time to time how Ruby is kind of the "true" Perl 6, it even has flip flops!).
In truth, these days, I feel the whole "interpreted languages" class is on the decline, at least on the server. There are a lot of really great native languages that have come up within the last few years, enabled in large part by LLVM. And this trend doesn't seem over yet.
Languages like Rust, Swift, Go, Zig or Odin are making the value proposition of interpreted languages (lower perf but faster iterations) less compelling by being convenient enough while retaining performance. In short, we can now "have the cake and eat it too".
But the millions of lines in production are also not going awywhere anytime soon. I bet even Perl will still be around somewhere (distro tooling, glue scripts, build infra, etc...) when I retire.
Anyway, thank you Perl, thank you Larry Wall, love your quotes.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Larry_Wall