never left Perl (Score 1)

When I was an entry-level programmer in the 1990's (the kind of job AI is temporarily decimating), I was asked to manage a small application written by a previous developer in C. He wrote it as a small TCP/IP client and server, which was probably not necessary, but at the time I didn't know better. I inherited an O'Reilly Perl book, and following an example I was able to recode the application in Perl in a week. I started using it for text-processing tasks, which were abundant, and then CGI applications, which were the new hotness as the web emerged. Two years later I was teaching a course in Perl to the rest of the office because it brought recognized productivity gains, and we brough in an instructor for an advanced Perl course. I also inherited about 20 KLOC of Perl written by somebody outside our office, so I was not alone. What I recognized then was that in a Unix environment, Perl could do most of what C could do with the massive programming efficiency advantage often outweighing the minor runtime efficiency you would get from writing and compiling C. Perl could also do everything that shell programming allowed, so I could live in Perl and get the job done. As my career progressed, I adopted the approach of focusing my proficiency on two languages, one for quick and dirty tasks (Perl) and one for bulletproof production software (for me, Java). I still had to learn and use a dozen other languages in minor ways along the way, but those two turned out to be ideal options because of their open source nature and general longevity. I could run Perl on any Linux installation anywhere, including hosted services where I couldn't run anything else I trusted. I saw Python rising, but I didn't need it for anything in particular and was turned off by the significance of spacing in code interpretation and the cataclysm of version 2 being incompatible with version 3. For personal reasons, I transitioned to being a full time hgh school teacher around 2010. I took a break from software and taught math. When I later started teaching modern programming, Java was king (the AP computer science test uses Java). Perl, on the other hand, seemed to be disappearing and wasn't a language suitable for high school programmers. Around 2015 I met Larry Wall and saw him speak a conference. It was clear then that the existential issue with Perl was that Larry was the language, and he was working on Perl 6 to the extent he could given his health issues. The Perl 5 community was robust and still progressing, but the impression was that it was one day going to be replaced by the new version if only they could fix certain performance bottlenecks.... In the last decade I have written some Perl programs that are extremely useful for my day to day teaching work. I still teach Java and an increasing amount of JavaScript and SQL. I've never had to write much Python, although that is probably the most popular langauge among my students and other teachers. Most of my C experiences involve extracting a tarball, typing "make", and crossing my fingers. I looked at a C# book once and thought I accidentally grabbed a Java book because it was indistiguishable. I didn't waste time at any point with PHP, Ruby, ColdFusion, WordPress, ...etc. I took a graduate course that focused on Rust, and if I wanted to go in a new direction that would be it. In short, I never stopped using Perl and from my experiences I can understand why it would be a popular choice for anybody that learns it. Now that Perl 6 is Raku and not the heir apparent of Perl 5, I theorize the stigma of investing in learning Perl is gone. If you use Linux, you invariably have immediate access to Perl so the barrier to entry is low; at the same time I am seeing an increasing number of young students comfortable with installing and using Linux. For once and done tasks, especially involving text or data formatting, Perl can do it all, especially with the vast collection of libraries. I personally think Larry Wall's greatest contribution was creating a maximal version of regular expression articulation; I haven't seen a language that does it better. I'm happy to see Perl get a second life, and I feel lucky to have deeply learned two programming langauges in the 1990's that are relevant today. Everything I wrote in Perl 30 years ago still runs now, unchanged. That is in contrast to just about everything else in software development along the same timeline.