Perl remains the ultimate proof of concept language. It takes 5 man years to write a semi-functional network facing provisioning framework in Java. It takes a man month to get to the same point (and way beyond) in perl. So as long as people still try to do a proofs of concept, perl will provide job security for many people.

Any idiot can write unreadable code in any language.

As a professional Perl developer I write readable, maintainable code. Having said that I won't be taking up Perl 6 for a long time and I doubt any of my clients will require it.

My god, it's plain to see the days - if not weeks! - of research that went into this piece. Seriously, is El Reg just trolling, or do you hire your writers directly from the Digg userbase?

Nicely written. So much better when achieved without bad language.

Hey, Sierra published a new Leisure Suit Larry game?

Who's that girl, Perl? I bet she's hot...

Will Paris be in it?

"...you start with a standard language and you can mutate it."

That sounds much more like C++ and Boost!

I've seem some huge sites (50 million visitors a day huge) backended by Perl developed as proof of concept, which was going to be rewritten in lean C for raw blazing speed.. but it never quite happened. The perl kept going without breaking, was nice to maintain, and no-one had to take the time out to develop secure bullet-proof C with racing lines.

People rarely intend to deploy perl quite as much as they eventually do. However, it also doesn't let them down as much as many of the alternatives when they do. It's a really weird beast. Yay for Larry Wall, on balance.

@Jim:

You said:

"""When someone says it looks like "modem noise" or "pure punctuation", what they really mean is that they just never learned it, and they wish to de-emphasize its importance."""

No. When people refer to the Perl 'line noise' problem, they are calling a spade a spade. It persists as a truism because it is, in fact, true. It is standard operating procedure to use the following characters liberally in even the most trivial Perl application:

<>$@;".'/^[\]&|

Whereas in many, many other languages these sorts of symbols are few and far between. And as for the arrogant notion that "...what they really mean is that they just never learned it..." all I have to say is that I will sign off with my handle, in Perl:

perl -e "s&&tnirp_auto_reverse&&&s&.*_&$'&ee&&s&$'&&&&s&_([^_]*)$&&&&eval($+)"

Remember the Second system effect that the Mythical Man-

Month warned us all about? Perl 6 is the poster child. Years in the making, and now so late that by the time it's ready for people to bet their jobs on, no one will care. (Perhaps I'll run it on the GNU Hurd kernel. Oh wait, another Second System there - what is it now, 17 years?)

Pragmatism needs to be drilled into every coder out there. Make it as elegant as you like, but if there's a toss up between "good enough" and "years late", go with "good enough' every time. I have yet to see any technology that was delayed in order to achieve perfection that actually turned out to be as good as the delay should have suggested.

I went to a YAPC this year, partly to see if Larry Wall really does resemble Ned Flanders as much as he seems to in his internet writings. I was surprised that he was a lot funnier in real life than his writings suggest, and also surprised by the sinking feeling I got from his talk about Perl 6 of hearing about something which is so aimless that it will never be finished.

Perl originated from Larry's wanting a shortcut language he could use when system administrating at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, something better than awk and sh and sed. The reason that it is so useful is because it was made by someone who was creating a tool to actually get their job done, hence the design tends to make common operations easy.

Since Perl became popular, Larry seems to have taken up talking and writing about Perl as a full time job, and he doesn't have to administer anyone's computers any more, so he can go off and pontificate about how Perl is a "post modern language" or how Perl is "just like a natural language" or how Perl is a "machine shop for creating tools" or other such drivel. The reason that Perl 6 is so horribly delayed is because there is no actual practical need for the language.

If Larry wants to get Perl 6 finished, he should go back to his old job at NASA or some other kind of useful employment instead of spending his time nattering on about his grandiose plans.

It's perfect for us much hated system admins. Where else would you be able to download add-ons that attach to any system imaginable and all using the exactly same API specs? Perl really is the Gatling Gun of languages! Bullets spraying all over the place and every one of them missing the target!

Ugh, perl - is anyone seriously still using it? At a previous job I actually installed a check-in trigger which bounced anything resembling a perl script.

Good point.

Except Perl 5 is way better than good enough so there was no great pressure to deliver Perl 6 early.

Its quite hard to make something good better, look at the vast "impovement " to XP that is Vista.

Plus you have got to remeber that Larry et al have day jobs!

...but got a heart attack before he could write the second part of his rant, so El Reg just published the part already in the Word.

Like, finish sentences and not just plug expletives to claim the f*cking f*cker is f*cking f*cked?

This day is as weird a beast as Perl raped by APL.

When I started with Perl it was a revelation that problems as hard as I could then solve using Perl were solvable with so little effort compared to strictly typed languages lacking decent libraries. After using Perl for a couple of years I discovered I could solve even harder problems using Python in a reasonable amount of time and later I discovered I could still understand my own coding a year or 2 later after I'd designed something.

Like Perl, written lots and lots of hackish weird shit in it over the years, particularly prototypes. I prefer to work in other languages these days, but I still have a particular fondness for it.

And yet, I can still find the article funny, unlike some of the humourless bastards that seem to be unable to restrain themselves from commenting every Ted writes something.

Seriously children, if you don't like the humour, stop reading his articles.

And BTW Ted, there wasn't anywhere near enough profanity in that article, man up.

... is overrated. Really. I refuse to believe in a general-purpose language that makes my life as a student of that language terrible by making the mantra something like, "Believe me, I know what I'm doing, you feeble creature! It is okay and acceptable for there to be twenty different uses for every keyboard character and it is not shameful for each routine to be different according to how you use it!"

So I learned Tcl and still can't get over the beauty of it. You should, too - you'll soon understand why pragmatism isn't all there is to it, and will probably wonder why perl still exists for doing more than states/awk and sed do now but faster. Why, wasn't that why perl was invented? And don't you find Python/ruby/Tcl already doing it better? Pffft!

You should require about ten minutes to fully digest the Tcl(n) manpage. Then you should require about three minutes for each command. Then you should be able to write a general-purpose program. You will find Tcl more metamorphic than perl, as well as much more minimal and hacker-sane. In a few days you will be incredibly attractive to members of the opposite sex, as can be evidenced from the fact that I still don't have a girlfriend. :-)

Lest there be any question as to my awesome hacker potential: my MTA of choice is sendmail, and I write my very own line noise^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hcf files.

So ner! :-P

Cheers,

Sabahattin

On a technical note, "similar things" do differ, otherwise they are not called "similar" but "identical". So yes, similar things have common overlap, as well as distinct differences. They just have more things in common than not.

The article calls it zen, most linguists will prefer to call it actually paying attention to what the words used mean =)

And on a different technical note, perl's always had the hots for the "million and one ways to do the same job", so that tiny difference is apparently crucially important to the language. Why it can't be left an unintentional consequence of the language is a bit beyond me, but there you have it. Perl 6 - a language no one really needs, but with the help from Sun and Google will no doubt blossom into the new java: just another programming language to learn so you don't come off elitist when you turn down a well paying job because you felt better than the language they were using, even though you'll still settle for unpaid overtime because "that's what coders do" ;)

When I see my neighbor using another type of lawn mower than me I quietly accept the fact that he probably has another way of mowing his lawn. If Perl does the job, and it indisputably does, then let the Perl coders have their way. :-)

@Sabahattin: I'm a satisfied network engineer with a pleasant job and a very lovely and beautiful girlfriend, and I use Perl. Sure you don't want to go back to using Perl? ;-)

And remember gentlemen: Programming languages are of no importance, only beer in pubs matter!