I think Perl is closer to Esperanto - the vast majority of people will never want to learn it and the people that know it won't stfu about how everyone should use it! And they could all use a shower!

(I kid... Mostly)

[–] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 6 points 3 months ago

As a Perl user who won't shut up about it... Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty fair.

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago

No, that's perfect

[–] zero_spelled_with_an_ecks@programming.dev 2 points 3 months ago

Plus it has markers for variable types just like Esperanto has suffixes for parts of speech. Wall was a linguist, after all.

[–] OpenStars 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

You... you shut up! Excuse me, I have to go take a shower:-) (/s, edit: to be clear on both sentences here)

Anyway you're right (no /s) - at one point it filled in a gap between the likes of C++ and Assembly on the one hand and shell scripting (bash, awk, grep, sed, each with its own syntax and very little of that shared in common with one another) and I guess Fortran on the other. I still prefer it enormously to everything else - it's quirky but fun:-) - though I get why a less experienced person should choose Python and stick with it, even as we all wish that there was another alternative that would work better than either.

And since I can't resist: Perl is 8-20x faster than Python, and major websites like DuckDuckGo and booking.com use it. Sigh....I guess it's time for that shower now:-).