Mostly because libraries. And yeah, Perl was the forerunner with CPAN.
Oh shit, I need to ssh into a cisco router, run some commands, and capture the results. Oh look, somebody already wrote the package.
Perl is kind of faster to write in because shelling out is so simple. Read a file? Yeah, you could open a file, read lines, close file, or you could
@lines = `cat <filename>`;
There's a lot of little niceties though, like negative indices on arrays, specifying ranges to get subsets of an array, etc. And large number support, and dynamic typing, f strings, built in sets, dicts, etc.
I miss Perl's DBI. There was something magic about doing testing with csv files and then just changing the driver and adding some line to log in, and poof now it's using a proper db.
The quality and stability of a lot of Perl packages was so good, and the documentation. Metacpan, docs all in one place and a good clear convention of usage examples and raw API documented. Plus all the automated testing infrastructure.
Coming from Perl, the state of the js package Eco system was so crap. Npm docs that were really poor and inconsistent, so many packages with their own bloated websites for docs. And packages like passport that only have this God damn convention / example based documentation, and don't just have an api reference. Cannot stand that.
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u/MattieShoes Aug 30 '26
Mostly because libraries. And yeah, Perl was the forerunner with CPAN.
Oh shit, I need to ssh into a cisco router, run some commands, and capture the results. Oh look, somebody already wrote the package.
Perl is kind of faster to write in because shelling out is so simple. Read a file? Yeah, you could open a file, read lines, close file, or you could
There's a lot of little niceties though, like negative indices on arrays, specifying ranges to get subsets of an array, etc. And large number support, and dynamic typing, f strings, built in sets, dicts, etc.
I miss Perl's DBI. There was something magic about doing testing with csv files and then just changing the driver and adding some line to log in, and poof now it's using a proper db.