this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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Programming
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Isn't exactly this kind of thing what is mostly responsible for the demise of Perl?
As I heard it told, the developers of Perl worked so long & hard on the next version after Perl 5, but then veered off to make a new language (Raku) and despite the reality being otherwise, people feared so much that Perl would die (i.e. that 6 would never materialize) that in the meantime "everyone" had switched to Python (despite it clearly being an inferior language - hehehehe:-P).
So that would be a "con" I suppose, if fights over which language is better ends up diluting efforts to work on or with either.
Perl died because better tools became available.
Python is not better in every way, it's just more general-purpose, so has a wider range of applicability.
Also more people use it, though by that logic we should all be forced to use Windows bc everyone else does as well?
And Perl both still exists and is actively maintained, so it "lost prominence" rather than "died".
Okay, but you're the one who called out "the demise of Perl". Have you changed your mind? I was just responding to your question.
For what it's worth, I think you were right about that: Perl is dead, in the sense of no longer growing or even maintaining the reach it once had. Other languages are overwhelmingly chosen for new code, while Perl has mostly fallen into disuse outside of people who learned it in its heyday and haven't moved on, and irrelevance outside of legacy systems. It might not be quite as much a dead language as Latin (which also still exists and sees some use) but it's well on its way there.
Haha, oh yes, definitely not only not actively growing anymore but fully actively declining instead - those internal politics mattered more than the actual language issues themselves, once again. Every time I see another Python update and how very many things they break, I think that thought again. Tbf newer updates breaking older code happens even with C++ too - backwards compatibility affects just everything - though the whole Python 2 vs. 3 definitely still rankles me.
I guess I'm still having emotional trouble letting it go - but that is an absolutely perfect example of Latin, still spoken yet most definitely also considered "dead" at the same time. I guess this about sums it up: