topbanner_forum
  *

avatar image

Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?

Login with username, password and session length
  • Friday March 29, 2024, 1:48 am
  • Proudly celebrating 15+ years online.
  • Donate now to become a lifetime supporting member of the site and get a non-expiring license key for all of our programs.
  • donate

Author Topic: Is Perl still being used?  (Read 9211 times)

jeremejazz

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2009
  • **
  • Posts: 59
  • hey!
    • View Profile
    • Personal Website
    • Donate to Member
Is Perl still being used?
« on: October 26, 2009, 05:02 AM »
Is perl still being used?.. . it was widely used years ago... who among you are still using this language?

bgd77

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2007
  • **
  • Posts: 203
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Is Perl still being used?
« Reply #1 on: October 26, 2009, 09:09 AM »
I use it, at work. I heard that it is in a fierce competition with Python, but I do not know who is winning.

Jibz

  • Developer
  • Joined in 2005
  • ***
  • Posts: 1,187
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Is Perl still being used?
« Reply #2 on: October 26, 2009, 09:54 AM »
When I find myself in need of processing a larger amount of text in some non-trivial manner, I usually dig out my trusty old Programming Perl book, and try to remember how to hack it :Thmbsup:.

Gothi[c]

  • DC Server Admin
  • Charter Honorary Member
  • Joined in 2006
  • ***
  • Posts: 873
    • View Profile
    • linkerror
    • Donate to Member
Re: Is Perl still being used?
« Reply #3 on: October 27, 2009, 07:28 AM »
I use perl all the time.
Whenever I find I have a bash script that's getting too long or too complicated I grab for perl.
When I need any sort of parsing-heavy application I grab for perl.
Just recently I made an apache stats analyzer in perl (awstats was missing some stuff I wanted) and only a few hours of perl code gets you a really nice result.
Sysadmins use perl a lot to automate all sorts of stuff, like I said, the next step up from a bash script seems to be a good use imo.

bgd77

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2007
  • **
  • Posts: 203
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Is Perl still being used?
« Reply #4 on: October 27, 2009, 08:30 AM »
I agree with Gothi[c] and Jibz, for text parsing Perl is great!

I just love  :-* to use Perl's regular expressions. And I know that there are some other applications that also use Perl's regex.

urlwolf

  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2006
  • ***
  • Posts: 1,837
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Is Perl still being used?
« Reply #5 on: October 27, 2009, 05:04 PM »
I'm using it right now. Parsing the entire wikipedia, and creating a coocurrence matrix of words and articles. CPAN is great, and while I like ruby and python better, for this perl is just faster and there's more built-in already.

Ehtyar

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2007
  • **
  • Posts: 1,237
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Is Perl still being used?
« Reply #6 on: October 27, 2009, 09:01 PM »
I :-* Perl as a language, but the lack of progress on the interpreter and the standard library is truly astonishing. By the time Perl 6 is ready, no one's gonna know what it is. However, Perl can be used for just about anything a sysadmin needs to do (Goth Man will probably back me up there), so I use it very often. As a novice or dedicated Windows user, you *may* want to consider Python over Perl, but otherwise Perl still rules the roost IMHO.

Python is probably the closest thing to a "competitor" you can have as far as programming languages go. It's similar to the vim/emacs debate in that respect. Ruby seems to be coming up from behind there too...

Ehtyar.

bgd77

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2007
  • **
  • Posts: 203
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Is Perl still being used?
« Reply #7 on: October 28, 2009, 02:38 AM »
As a novice or dedicated Windows user, you *may* want to consider Python over Perl, but otherwise Perl still rules the roost IMHO.

Most of my Perl scripts are runed from Windows, I can't remember having problems on it. What is nice is that I was able to run the same scripts on Linux with almost 0 modifications (the only thing I had to do is to convert the script file from MSDOS format to Linux format).

Did you have problems with Perl, on Windows? If yes, I would like to know what happened, maybe I will encounter them in the future.

Ehtyar

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2007
  • **
  • Posts: 1,237
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Is Perl still being used?
« Reply #8 on: October 28, 2009, 05:30 AM »
The issue is simply that Python is natively supported on Windows, and it has been made clear that Windows support is something that the Python community has a vested interest in. Even Unladen Swallow are hoping to be able to keep their port supporting Windows, despite that goal being almost in direct contradiction of their primary goal.

Perl, however, is not built for Windows by the Perl development community. There is a nasty hack release called ActivePerl, which is overflowing with non-standard nonsense and barely maintained, and Strawberry Perl, a much cleaner distro but still does not have a complete standard distribution, not to mention Rakudo on Windows is no different (though that could change). I can certainly understand a newbie wanting the stability and assurance they'd get from using Python over Perl.

Ehtyar.

bgd77

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2007
  • **
  • Posts: 203
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Is Perl still being used?
« Reply #9 on: October 28, 2009, 07:15 AM »
Yes, you are right, for Windows you have to install a 3rd party distribution and this can generate the problems you have mentioned.

Fortunately I did not have problems with Active Perl until now.