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Perl's decline was cultural

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393 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 06 Dec 25 17:42 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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jordanb ◴[06 Dec 25 18:16 UTC] No.46175337[source]▶
I always found the Perl "community" to be really off-putting with all the monk and wizard nonsense. Then there was the whole one-liner thing that was all about being clever and obscure. Everything about Python came off as being much more serious and normal for a young nerd who wasn't a theater kid.
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lysace ◴[06 Dec 25 18:36 UTC] No.46175513[source]▶
Perl is a sysadmin language. There's "always" been this tension between sysadmins and developers.

In my mind (developer back then) I'd amateur-psychoanalyze all of that nonsense as some kind of inferiority complex meant to preserve the self image. Needless complexity can be a feature!

And now we are all developers!

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MrDarcy ◴[06 Dec 25 18:38 UTC] No.46175535[source]▶
In the 2000’s Python was also a sysadmin language.

Edit: But I see your point, Google SRE’s around the late 2000’s reached for Python more than Perl.

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oncallthrow ◴[06 Dec 25 19:25 UTC] No.46175916[source]▶
I think Perl is still more popular even today than Python as a sysadmin language. Late 2000s it certainly was. Maybe Google was different, but across the industry more widely Python was barely used, Perl was used everywhere.
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1. lysace ◴[06 Dec 25 19:34 UTC] No.46175985[source]▶
My experience:

Sysadmin-driven companies (typically Sun-based) often used Perl.

Developer-driven companies used other languages running on cheaper X86 Linux.