this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
65 points (93.3% liked)

Technology

59106 readers
4223 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

hi, i was interested if perl is still relevant in this day and age. Perl has been on the decline for a very long time now. Perl 6 (now named 'raku) not being backwards compatible with perl 5 code made the already small perl community even smaller by splitting it in half. A good example is lisp with it's thousands of different dialects.

Is it still worth using or is it bound to legacy software forever? Like cobol.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] NeoNachtwaechter 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Perl hasn't lost any of it's qualities or relevance or usefulness.

It's just, with these incompatible language upgrades, they are creating artificial barriers for starters and for occasional users. The outcome is that they are making it less popular, sadly.

[–] elbarto777 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Thank you for your service

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Which incompatible language upgrades? Are you talking about Perl 6?

That was never really an iteration of Perl, and it was renamed Raku some years back so is no longer named like it’s an iteration of Perl.

Perl continues as Perl 5 and honestly values compatibility extremely highly, probably more than many (most?) other languages. There have been a handful of breaking changes over the years (most notable for me was the hash key ordering thing) but those are usually security related rather than anything else.