Perl '2009

Reports that "Perl is outdated" appeared on the Internet already in 2003, and maybe earlier. I met the funny expression “Perl is outdated like my grandmother”, dated September 2003. Not paying attention to the young man’s ironic attitude towards his grandmother, and considering that the appearance of Perl 5.005 in 1998 can only be considered the beginning of the flowering of the language, it must be concluded that the author of this phrase in that distant 2003 only exchanged the second decade.

In the depths of this lies some kind of secret desire of some programmers to play the role of Nostradamus IT-sphere: to make their own prediction regarding the popularity of Linux, Windows; determine which programming languages ​​will sink into oblivion, and which will flourish in a couple of years. For the past 5 years, I have heard statements about “obsolescence” and “dying away” about Perl, PHP, Java and Basic (which, in its “visual” incarnation, looks quite alive).

There is no programming language without flaws. Perl has a lot of them too: special variables ( $/ , $, ,, $+ and dozens of others), an incomplete and inconsistent implementation of the PLO and the fact that the capabilities needed in 1998 appeared only in 2007 with the release of Perl 5.10. For nearly 15 years of development, Perl 5 has come a long way from evolution from replacing text-processing console to utilities to a multifunctional language, and in capable hands to a very convenient and productive tool.

The next funny "statement" is the inability to maintain code written in Perl. As the English-speaking programmers say, “Nostradamusy”, “Perl is the write-only language”. If you try, you can write programs on Perl that, for clarity, will compete with the code processed by the obfuscator. Perl hackers, who love this language precisely for this, are an honorable part of a huge community of people using Perl in all areas of their business.
')
Naturally, more or less serious applications are written with an eye to the maintenance. Moreover, there has also been an evolution within the community. In 2005, for example, a well-known book was published in the Damian Conway community called Perl Best Practices, in which he describes what steps need to be taken in order for Perl applications to be as consistent as possible.

From the beginning of 2009, chromatic took over the baton in his blog , which is likely to result in the book Modern Perl. In a blog, he claims that in 2009 it is not necessary to write in Perl in the way it was done in 2001. The language has changed, there are means to achieve the same results, but in more acceptable ways: so that there is no need to go into the documentation for the purpose of the next special variable so that use speaking names of variables, subroutines and modules to make the structure of the program more transparent.

If the programmer makes a fair amount of effort, he can write transparent and maintainable code even in such an extraordinary programming language like Perl.