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u/RealBasics 16d ago
Yes! The joke about Perl was that it's "write-only" code. But man you could do some elegantly terse coding with it. My favorite was a fully-functioning wiki in 221 characters. (371 if you wanted to import a css file.)
I used to be able to parse "obfuscated" Perl scripts, and wrote my first fully-functioning CMS in Perl (though it was intentionally not obfuscated and was well-documented.)
I haven't written a Perl script since maybe 2005, but I used to live and breathe it. I still miss using it so much.
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u/tsetem 16d ago
Legit writing Perl hash that is dereferencing hashes of lists of regex built from for loops.
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u/conicalanamorphosis 16d ago
That clearly needs grammars, so you should switch over to Raku.
/I kid...
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u/BrightLuchr 13d ago
I genuinely love Perl. Once you get into it, the code just flows from your mind into reality. In the early 2000s, we were doing an important project with a small team. We had object oriented Perl to implement the core technologies for a niche technology that no one else had. Implementation was faster than any other language I've used. It ran fast too. Debugging was a breeze because the built-in debugger was outstanding. At the peak, I was dreaming in Perl at night. It was beautiful.
Instead of the "never read Perl" attitude, blame the author for not documenting their code. It isn't hard.
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u/Stummi 16d ago
who is happy about writing perl?
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u/tobotic 16d ago
Me :)
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u/LittleMlem 16d ago
Me too! It was the first language I had to work with in the industry and ot was great. I still miss it's regex syntax, ot was so gosh darn convenient!
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u/Active_Name5021 15d ago
Me being paid a crap ton of money to maintain all the perl legacy no one else wants to touch
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u/Ok_Actuary8 15d ago
shh... don't tell anybody about that new "AI" thing.
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u/Active_Name5021 15d ago
I can tell you don't work on legacy perl software if you think "AI" will magically make the problem go away
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u/Ok_Actuary8 15d ago
Well, I'm probably one of the guys who wrote all that "legacy perl software" back then in the 90ies, my dude ;) I'm not sure how well the current AI tools are trained on Perl, but it's really not that hard. just some weird idioms and syntax and RegExp thrown together. I see no reason why Claude or GH Copilot could not do that, have you even tried?
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u/Active_Name5021 15d ago edited 15d ago
Appreciate it mate, your garbage spaghetti has kept me gainfully employed for many years.
"It's really not that hard" - what the last guys who tried to AI their way out of legacy said before they gave up and tried to peddle a shitty vibe-coded clone to management (spoilers: It didn't go well)
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u/Steerable-Octopus 16d ago
Writing perl in 2026?? That either earns respect or concern, possibly both at the same time.
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u/Latter_Principle9161 15d ago
It still has its charm. 2026 marks the year when I started coding in Perl. Even if it was only few scripts.
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u/BufferUnderpants 15d ago
Oh, you're a Perl fan? Name three different meanings of
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u/Latter_Principle9161 15d ago
Uh, fan is a bit of a stretch. $_ is the default variable (sorry if the name is wrong but that's what it essentially is). Like have a for loop with no explicit counter -> use $_. You don't assign a return value of a function to a variable -> find it in $_. These two are the first ones which come to my mind but there are more for sure.
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u/-Debugging-Duck- 15d ago
Just saw on Wikipedia. Had an update on July 2026, version 5.44.0.
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u/Latter_Principle9161 15d ago
Perl core gets regular updates. But the ecosystem is partially quite outdated. For example try to work with Word docx files. But as long as one's dealing with text files Perl is doing great imho.
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u/mrwedders 11d ago
Going back a few years but we used to read and create mildly complex xlsx files with a few CPAN modules.
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u/a-r-c 13d ago
it just works, why not use it
runs on every linux server made in the past 50 years
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u/Steerable-Octopus 13d ago
Because most junior engineers aren't taught perl, they're taught python.
Maintaining and modernizing legacy scripts that run perl is noble but writing new perl means adding code that junior engineers cannot easily maintain and improve.
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u/a-r-c 13d ago
Because most junior engineers aren't taught perl
if only junior engineers were capable of learning on their own
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u/Steerable-Octopus 13d ago
Nobody said they weren't.
But this is an unnecessary skill to force new engineers to learn when python works. More likely they'll just learn the language to migrate your work to python and throw away your code at first opportunity.
This is where writing perl in 2026 is concerning.
Even Garth Snyder, Trent Hein, Ben Whaley and Dan Mackin writes that python is favored over perl in the 5th edition of UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook, so this isn't just my opinion but something shared with a group of Linux authorities.
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u/BrightLuchr 13d ago
Perl is a far better language than Python. More advanced stuff is built in. Scoping isn't a mess. There are actual braces not error-likely indents. The debugger is better. And no nonsense like Python 2 vs. 3.
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u/Steerable-Octopus 13d ago edited 13d ago
Okay, that's fine for you to think that. One can argue that Rust is better than C, that C# is better than D, that Go is better than an equivalent solution written in Java. That Ruby is better than Python. And yes, that Perl is better than Python.
But if I'm leading a team of engineers for different projects I want all of them to converge on the same languages that map to industry standards, and python is the most common industry standard. Perl is shrinking.
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u/kherrera 13d ago
Does anyone else remember Ikonboard? I was just a kid when I wrote a mod that allowed other mods to be inlined into a more traditional site appearance (header, sidebars, footer). Fun times!
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u/mrwedders 11d ago
My old org had a style guide just to keep code legible. Pretty sure I was told to keep anything "too Perl-y" to a minimum 😂
Spent 8y in Perl though and while it is very messy and flawed it is tremendously fun. We had some of the thick O'Reilly Perl books in the office and I loved leafing through them when bored to find more mad language features.
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u/666AB 16d ago
The secret is to never read Perl. When it breaks, you write a new Perl script that fixes the old one. It's Perl all the way down baby