Perl's decline was cultural

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.

I'm having to pick up some perl now, and while I don't interact with the community, it surely _feels_ like it was written by wizards, for wizards. Obscure, non-intuitive oneliners, syntax that feels like it was intentionally written to be complicated, and a few other things that feel impossible to understand without reading the docs. (Before everyone jumps on me - yes, as a developer, I should be able to read documentation. And I did. But until I did so, what the code was doing was completely opaque to me. That feels like bad language design.)

Some of it I recognize as being an artefact of the time, when conciseness really mattered. But it's still obnoxious in 2025.

The whole thing reminds me of D&D, which is full of classes & spells that only exist in modern D&D because of One Guy who happened to be at the table with Gygax, who really wanted to be a wuxia guy he saw in a movie, or because he really wanted a spell to be applicable for that one night at the table, and now it's hard-coded into the game.

It’s interesting to me how brains work.

Perl has always “flowed” for me and made mostly intuitive sense. Every other language I’ve had to hack on to get something done is a struggle for me to fit into some rigid-feeling mental box.

I understand I’m the weird one, but man I miss Perl being an acceptable language to pound out a quick program in between “bash script” and “real developer”.

If you’re in the market for fun hackable tool that sits between “bash script” and “real developer” I highly recommend checking out babashka.

It lets you write shell scripts with clojure. Babashka itself is a single executable, so no JVM bulk or startup time. And the built-in libs include all sorts of nifty utilities. Parsers, servers, excellent async stuff (but IMO clojure might have the best async story of any language out there so I’m biased), http stuff. All macro-able and REPL-able and everything. It’s a scripting dream, and when it’s time to be an adult, you can throw it on the JVM too!