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in reply to Re: The future of Perl?
in thread The future of Perl?

…then Perl is probably in the top 5 in use.

I agree with this guess. I see many job ads that list Perl in the small print after the headliners Java, C, SQL, Sysadmin, QA, Python, etc. Jobs that headline Perl are rarely followed but much else besides PHP or the occasional big data or VOIP package.

And to comment on the overall thread a bit more seriously than I did initially: Perl is doing better today reputation-wise than it was in 2005–2010 by my anecdotal experiences and the problem never had anything at all to do with Perl 6 as I have heard it. Also: MOP may come to the core, Perl 5 is faster, less buggy, and better with Unicode than all the high level interpreted languages, and depending on how you see a thing Perl has the best OO and the richest web and ORM frameworks. PSGI has normalized, unified, and revived the language that stormed the early web. These are things that keep languages alive. PHP sure isn’t surviving on its great reputation. I work primarily in Perl and have had two “greenfield” projects with it in the last five years (and JS of course being web stuff) at a Fortune 20 company. So :P

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Re^3: The future of Perl?
by Jenda (Abbot) on Nov 11, 2014 at 16:44 UTC

    It might be better with Unicode, but actually the last time I wanted to use it I had to go elsewhere due to its lack of support for Unicode filenames under Windows. Maybe the situation is better now, but I'm not talking about a distant past. Directory operations and Unicode

    I don't know what's the status now, nor do I give a flying rat's ass about what the heck is the situation under various flavours of Unix, but why would I use something if I can't even get it to open files?

    Jenda
    Enoch was right!
    Enjoy the last years of Rome.

      And I share exactly the same level of concern for your platform as you do for mine. :P Kidding! I care about the overall Perl ecosphere.

      This is actually awful. Have other high-level languages dealt with it correctly/well?

        There's plenty of places in Perl, where the built-ins were modeled to fit Unix. There's plenty of core modules designed to fit Unix. Porting of both to other operating systems often requires complicated hacks and emulations. Whenever there's something that works (a certain way) under Unix, it get's added and others have to bend over backwards to at least emulate it. When, on the other hand, there is anything other operating system specific, it has to be implemented as module with that OS in the name even if there were several "other" systems supporting that in a similar enough way.

        In this particular case Windows has had UTF-16 filesystem for years, but as "On Linux, file names are zero-byte terminated binary strings, the interpretation is left to the userland. One can guess based on the locale, or just assume something globally, but neither approach is robust." nothing will ever be done with the core. It would be hard for the Unix-based ports. erm. Sorry, that's not a port, that's the base. Right?

        Would it be harder, more restricted or trickier than, say, the fork emulation? I doubt it.

        If it was easy under Linux, it would be done and others would find a way to emulate it, even if not 100% correctly, and the emulations would eventually improve. If it's hard under Linux, it doesn't happen.

        Jenda
        Enoch was right!
        Enjoy the last years of Rome.

      still broken!
Re^3: The future of Perl?
by Arunbear (Prior) on Nov 12, 2014 at 11:17 UTC
    This reminds me of a recent interesting blog post

      Fun. I actually know Selena Sol personally. The best comment is one I echo. Though I would say “biggest” in place of “only” perhaps–

      The only problem is missing Applications…… it is as simple as that…..