I always find it interesting when people assume that just because something is out of their awareness is dead…
I learned Perl not too long ago and it is an absolute beast at text processing, a lot less annoying than Python and pip install and cpan seems to have everything in it, implemented multiple times.
The language doesn’t hold your hand at all, doesn’t have tooling like fancy LSP and such, but it is quite usable. With that said, I’d probably hate to use it in a team since you can do the same thing in a dozen different ways!
My first job was on a Perl + MySQL stack, and honestly the codebase was pretty straightforward and “C-like”. But yeah, it can definitely produce some incomprehensible eldritch monstrosities.
The good news is that there is some LSP support now. I recommend PerlNavigator if this is something that interests you: https://github.com/bscan/PerlNavigator
Current macOS ships with both. On a new laptop with Sequoia installed:
√ ~ % /usr/bin/python3 --version
Python 3.9.6
√ ~ % /usr/bin/perl -v
This is perl 5, version 34, subversion 1 (v5.34.1) built for darwin-thread-multi-2level (with 2 registered patches, see perl -V for more detail)
...
Beginning with 10.15, macOS doesn’t ship with Python anymore.
However, if you install the Xcode Command Line Tools, it will install Python solely because of their developer tool dependencies. It’s not really meant for end user development use. The longer term intent is to eliminate those dependencies but that’s a lot of work.
You probably see this version because you have the Command Line Tools installed. If you go to a macOS system without the Command Line Tools installed, you will get Apple’s deprecation notice when you try to run Python.
You're right. I installed the XCode command line tools as one of my first actions after getting the machine. I didn't realize that Python was no longer part of the stock configuration.
Yeah, I mean for at least a couple major versions, Apple stated Python was going to be deprecated in a future major release.
I learned this the hard way. I wrote a ~1,000 line Python script for our giant fleet of Macs only to discover Python was finally removed and that it was only present on my system, because I had installed the Command Line Tools.
Python isn't even remotely close to the popularity Perl had or its omnipresence till date. Python couldn't reach the peak of nearly anything it tried. For serious app dev Java/Golang won, Web is ruled by JS/React, C/C++/Rust rules places where performance is more critical. Python's refusal to take text and OS work serious has largely rendered it useless for serious scripting work. People use shell and old timers use Perl.
In the AI world, Python use is mostly invoke a series of framework API(a few hundred lines of code), for data manipulation you still have to use shell or Perl.
The internet, telecommunications, bioinformatics etc industries and entire generations of backend were built entirely in Perl. And by many definitions is still the case.
Funny you describe it like that, I call Python the modern day Perl, which is not always well received, but considering it is used to power so many major systems, it is arguably the Perl of today. I always mean to get more into Perl, but always find myself back in Python or C#.
I'm maintaining an absolutely massive Perl codebase at work. I've made it extremely resilient so that I can stop fire-fighting it and 2025 is the Year of the Rewrite. Wish me luck...
The only person I've worked with over the past 20+ years who used Perl was a bioinformatics guru. When he taught students in the lab, however, he'd switch to Python.
Bioinformaticisn here. While Perl has been popular in the field, R, Python, C/C++, and recently Rust are more common these days. I think it mostly has to do with the fact that bioinformatics used to be mainly dealing with huge text files (FASTA, FASTQ, SAM, BED, GTF/GFF, etc.), and for that purpose Perl is not a bad choice.
As the cost of sequencing keeps coming down, we sequence deeper, and the computational demand goes up. Plain-text is replaced with binary formats, and most of the heavy lifting is now done by compiled libraries. The benefits of Perl aren't really relevant anymore, and given the choice most of us simply prefer writing Python or R.
And just like that brand of cigarettes, it was a lot of fun back in the day (seriously, Camel did cool stuff), it's frowned on today, people constantly disparage the people who stick with it, and those of us who still use it will stick to it until we die.
If you were job hunting over the past few years, it’s possible you’d have seen Booking.com hiring. They reportedly have (or had, I think they were moving away from it) jobs with Perl listed.
Probably the biggest startup-esque company I saw that still used it.
I am one of the person who did the « heavy lifting » on this logo. One of the versions I contributed were actually inspired by the Clojure logo, so, I guess you are both right.
In this discarded version[1], the camel hump is used to create a « dune » in the background. I would have think it was the best, but we discarded it during the review sessions.
iOS dev with a background in hardware (where I used Perl daily to parse millions of lines of test data). Funny, just used perl the other day to parse an iOS repo for deeplink path handlers. Love it.
Its called Raku now, as the language differences in the experimental Perl 6 were enough to warrent it being spun off as a separate project. Perl 5 is still getting updates for quality of life improvements
They should get a new one. The P 6 in the wings relates back to an association that they're explicitly trying to move away from. Ie. the whole justification of the rename to Roku in the first place.
They've had an association with camels, stemming from O'Reilly's first book about the language, Programming Perl, with a camel on the cover. And that's trademarked.
The Perl Foundation sidesteps it by having a logo of a (pearl) onion, which is also useless because nobody associates with Perl with onions.
So this is perhaps a third way - it's a camel, it's not the camel that might cause confusion with O'Reilly's book.
> The Perl Foundation sidesteps it by having a logo of a (pearl) onion, which is also useless because nobody associates with Perl with onions.
The onion has been a metaphor for Perl for a couple of decades now. It was in the Camel Book, though I am not sure it was in the first edition. Larry Wall’s annual talk was (is? I stopped following) the State of the Onion. See for example
This is exactly right. We can't use a camel on a book about Perl, but we can use our own version of a camel otherwise. However, there are a number of camels floating around and it would be great if we could all standardize on the same thing. This is an attempt to do that. We will see how it works out.
Yeah, it's such a disgrace that people report on updates for software that's still being used and maintained. Linux is even worse about it. They should be writing articles about Multics and ITS instead.
To be clear: this is a logo suggested by a person who isn't affiliated with the perl foundation, nor the roku foundation, so it's not so much new logo as it's a suggestion for a new logo by a community member.
#/media/File%3ACamel_cigarettes_logo.png){kind=link}
I learned Perl not too long ago and it is an absolute beast at text processing, a lot less annoying than Python and pip install and cpan seems to have everything in it, implemented multiple times.
The language doesn’t hold your hand at all, doesn’t have tooling like fancy LSP and such, but it is quite usable. With that said, I’d probably hate to use it in a team since you can do the same thing in a dozen different ways!