In the same boat on the "why haven't people moved on"... Perl use to be ubiquitous but over time it's really gone to the wayside vs. Python tooling for more complex stuff, and back to basic BASH for the simple scripting needs.
Every time Perl comes up in a professional environment for me I'm reluctant to say I'm capable, because it's always a hacked-together mess from an engineer who's likely no longer with the company. (obviously this is VERY anecdotal to my career)
I dropped Perl from my resume about a decade ago because I just frankly don't want to work with it. The language is terse, and I don't think anyone who's starting off these days would be spending their time well by learning it. Make your own opinions, but mine is/has always been "ewww."
It’s the Perl culture, to do even simple things in the weirdest way possible and everyone will call you a wizard. Whereas the Python community praises complex ideas expressed as simple code and frowns on tricks. That’s why all but the the most obsessive have moved on. And from what I’ve seen Perl 6 takes it to the next level.
You pretty clearly have very little familiarity with "Perl culture" and even less with Perl6/Raku.
Perl 5 is in decline, no doubt. But it isn't because whomever you're visualizing when you wrote the above is an annoying nerd. People can and do disagree on the 'why'; I personally think it is the general decline of Unix-style syntax combined with the natural ebb and flow of language evolution.
If "what you've seen" is watching the compiler developers work through language design, the origin of your misconception at least makes a little sense, even if that's obviously a weird, unfair basis.
By all means, hate on perlmonks.org if you like. Just don't spread insulting nonsense.
It's unfortunate but that's the bread-and-butter of comment sections mentioning Perl (Perl 5 and Perl 6). And what's with "the most obsessive"? What's this supposed to imply?
In my realm I need things to be supportable by lots of people. I use languages that are modern + people want to use, I document like crazy, I use opinionated frameworks that have good track records, I need to hire engineers that can support the code I/others write, etc etc. I don't find your comment to be true, and will even go as far to say I've worked with very clean legacy code.
Tangential: If you look at any "popularity of language" studies Perl has been on a downward spiral for over a decade. Ex: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/perl/
I see "well that's just x" as a poor argument for, well... anything.
> it's always a hacked-together mess from an engineer who's likely no longer with the company.
Oh man, in 1996 I was at Nortel. Some Ms. C. in Computer Science (no longer with the company) left behind Perl cruft whose indentation levels didn't even match up:
whatever
{
}
type of thing. He didn't know how to operate a programmer's text editor.
I would rather deal with that than a project with millions of classes which are mostly empty full of useless comments that tell you nothing about how the project is put together.
> there should be a cryptocurrency based on Proof of Spam Assassination
Did you know that the blocking proof-of-work algorithm in Bitcoin today, derives from the Hashcash proof-of-work algorithm, which was originally designed to prove you are not a spammer!!
Every time Perl comes up in a professional environment for me I'm reluctant to say I'm capable, because it's always a hacked-together mess from an engineer who's likely no longer with the company. (obviously this is VERY anecdotal to my career)
I dropped Perl from my resume about a decade ago because I just frankly don't want to work with it. The language is terse, and I don't think anyone who's starting off these days would be spending their time well by learning it. Make your own opinions, but mine is/has always been "ewww."