Even in his peak, Perl’s popularity was always a little surprising. Perl is a triggering language disordered. It is often called “adhesive tape of the internet”, with programmers who joke that is a “Scripture only“Language: write but rarely read (at least successfully).
There is a nature of mashup amalgamated by Perl, all at the service of his motto: “There is more than one way to do it”. Just like there are synonyms in English, Perl has a variety of approaches to writing the same thing. Although this is a common feature of programming languages to a certain extent, however it seems to want to knock on the head with it. There are several ways, for example, to write conditional declarations, from the use of the traditional “If” to “unless”; to write an IF education backwards in a single line; Even to a three -part operator involving a question mark and a colon. I have a distinct memory, in the early 2000s, to write code to Perl one day and the following day he does not understand what I wrote.
But this disorder and baroque structure is actually intentional and part of the wider philosophy that underlies Perl. The creator of the language, Larry Wall, was trained in linguistics and his intention was to become, together with his wife, a missionary involved in rare languages. The wall ended up taking a different path and completely embraced the coding. But his profound thoughts on how languages work have never left him.
Wall’s perspective seemed to be that an obsession with linguistic purity was overrated. English has words of French, Greek, German and even Akkadian, which betrays its tortuous history and multile origins. We divide our infinite and dangle our modifiers. We have words, both understood and not. So, what is a bit of oddity when it comes to writing an IF education? Wall saw evolution as part of the language development process. There is an organic process in progress here and the final products must not be ordered. And so, a large and non -judgmental approach to the construction of the language is vital, whether it is a language designed to write scripts or sonnets.
Perl has its “more than one way” to do things and English has its numerous styles and flexible nature, a nature that can contain everything, from cooking recipes to haikus, to Faulkner’s shopping lists. This is the sign of something that is truly open. AS Wall once said: “I firmly convince that a language … should be an artistic amoral medium.” If Perl has a general vision or dogma, it is simply the fact that, perhaps, there should be no dogma programming.
To be clear, I have never been a deep user of Perl. His syntax and disorder overwhelmed his power for me, and when I was presented to the well -ordered structure of Python, I ran to that language and I never looked back. This could in fact be a suggestion on why the language has lost its shine. Also in 1998, during his period of maximum splendor, there were suggestions that Perl’s swelling could lead to the desire to jump to something “cleaner”. Whatever the reason, Perl is no longer as popular as it once was.