On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 08:57:21AM -0400, Eric Furman wrote: > So what is wrong with perl?? > It is nearly a standard in the UNIX Admin world.
Nothing is wrong with perl :) Well, perl is a post-modern baroque language. Which means that it is possible to write code the way you want to write it. Some people do not like that, they think there should be One True Way to do things and nothing else. Since narrow-minded people dominate the world... lots of people don't like perl. Some people come to perl thinking it's gonna be clean and lofty. But it's not. Perl solves real problems, so it has about as many warts as C. People who want tidy solutions that don't exist to real world, not so tidy problems, do not like perl. Perl is still around and well, it morphed and evolved to incorporate any interesting technology that came its way. You've got to realize a lot of OpenBSD devs are old farts who do not grasp anything modern (and modern includes OO techniques, so perl5 doesn't appeal to them). To be fair, a lot of them are actually interested in computer knowledge, so they had a look at Smalltalk. Those happy few won't be lost with perl. Perl isn't that popular with morons, though. Most of the management types used to write code in Cobol, now they write in Cobol's descendant (yep, that's java). Oh, yeah, and the hipsters types swear by ruby, which is just tweaked perl. (or maybe I missed the latest big trend, I don't know whether that's still haskell, or node.js).
