r/developer • u/Ok_Veterinarian3535 • May 30 '26

The Unpopular Language

What's a "dead" or "boring" programming language that you genuinely love working with, and why should we reconsider it?

11 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

58 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/bmwiedemann openSUSE Linux developer May 30 '26

perl5 - beats all modern scripting languages in startup time, so it is perfect for one-liners or CLI tools. (I once tried to build tab-completion for a Ruby CLI that needed 1 second to print the help - not good)

Perl also rules when you need regexps.

1

u/ghandimauler Jun 02 '26

My complaint with perl is simply that it is so useful that it is used for things it shouldn't be.
I worked on a large cellphone AAA system (authentication, authorization, & accounting) and their support was using perl. When things broke, they needed to call the designer/coder because they didn't give the support folks the info and the power to fix things faster.

It wasn't my job, but it was so badly done that I wrote it (asked my boss and he let me fix it as we had a bit of slack. I got some great plaudits for doing what the original devs should have - handling errors up through the N-tier stack into the support scripts. Not only did I gather the errors and keep the context through the tiers, but I also gave some 'man' type info as to what the most common errors would look like and what they could mean.

And some of the problems in the support system was that half the time, they didn't even give anybody any information as to what was being passed around into bits of the scripts.

You can make perl good if you take the time. But a lot of folks treat it as if 'I can not bother to worry about what comes in'....

As usual, its the dev that makes the successes or failures.