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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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mmastrac ◴[06 Dec 25 18:11 UTC] No.46175303[source]▶
In fairness, Perl died because it was just not a good language compared to others that popped up after its peak. Sometimes people just move to the better option.
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atherton94027 ◴[06 Dec 25 18:20 UTC] No.46175376[source]▶
There was so much complexity hidden behind "do what I mean". For example, scalar vs array context which was super subtle:

  my @var = @array  # copy the array
  my $var = @array  # return the count of elements in array
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1. petre ◴[06 Dec 25 20:12 UTC] No.46176259[source]▶
It's not complexity, it's magic. Useful when one cannot be bothered to write array.length. So is if (@a) when the array is empty.