For context for our younger audience members: Perl was the Python of its day back a little over 20 years ago. It was, at one time, hugely popular.
Perl is still hidden in dark corners all over Linux distributions and even macOS (which is why it still ships with Perl, but not Python).
Current macOS ships with both. On a new laptop with Sequoia installed:
√ ~ % /usr/bin/python3 --version
Python 3.9.6
√ ~ % /usr/bin/perl -v
This is perl 5, version 34, subversion 1 (v5.34.1) built for darwin-thread-multi-2level (with 2 registered patches, see perl -V for more detail)
...
Beginning with 10.15, macOS doesn’t ship with Python anymore.
However, if you install the Xcode Command Line Tools, it will install Python solely because of their developer tool dependencies. It’s not really meant for end user development use. The longer term intent is to eliminate those dependencies but that’s a lot of work.
You probably see this version because you have the Command Line Tools installed. If you go to a macOS system without the Command Line Tools installed, you will get Apple’s deprecation notice when you try to run Python.
You're right. I installed the XCode command line tools as one of my first actions after getting the machine. I didn't realize that Python was no longer part of the stock configuration.
Yeah, I mean for at least a couple major versions, Apple stated Python was going to be deprecated in a future major release.
I learned this the hard way. I wrote a ~1,000 line Python script for our giant fleet of Macs only to discover Python was finally removed and that it was only present on my system, because I had installed the Command Line Tools.
Funny you describe it like that, I call Python the modern day Perl, which is not always well received, but considering it is used to power so many major systems, it is arguably the Perl of today. I always mean to get more into Perl, but always find myself back in Python or C#.
I was an “advanced” Perl programmer back in the day, but now I use Python for those same tasks.
I never really enjoyed Python itself. I loved, LOVED Perl — at least when I was working with code I wrote.
I sometimes think about going back to Perl and finishing my days with it, but I haven’t pulled the trigger.
I always find it interesting when people assume that just because something is out of their awareness is dead…
I learned Perl not too long ago and it is an absolute beast at text processing, a lot less annoying than Python and pip install and cpan seems to have everything in it, implemented multiple times.
The language doesn’t hold your hand at all, doesn’t have tooling like fancy LSP and such, but it is quite usable. With that said, I’d probably hate to use it in a team since you can do the same thing in a dozen different ways!
My first job was on a Perl + MySQL stack, and honestly the codebase was pretty straightforward and “C-like”. But yeah, it can definitely produce some incomprehensible eldritch monstrosities.
I keep forgetting that Perl is still alive. I used to do a lot of Perl like 15 years ago. It was already legacy back then...
As far as I know, it is popular in bioinformatics because of https://bioperl.org/ Universities use that often in their curriculum.
Most Linux distributions contain ungodly amounts of Perl.
The only person I've worked with over the past 20+ years who used Perl was a bioinformatics guru. When he taught students in the lab, however, he'd switch to Python.
Bioinformaticisn here. While Perl has been popular in the field, R, Python, C/C++, and recently Rust are more common these days. I think it mostly has to do with the fact that bioinformatics used to be mainly dealing with huge text files (FASTA, FASTQ, SAM, BED, GTF/GFF, etc.), and for that purpose Perl is not a bad choice.
As the cost of sequencing keeps coming down, we sequence deeper, and the computational demand goes up. Plain-text is replaced with binary formats, and most of the heavy lifting is now done by compiled libraries. The benefits of Perl aren't really relevant anymore, and given the choice most of us simply prefer writing Python or R.
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Perl was obsolete like 10 years ago.
15 is pushing it.
Perl 6 never caught on.
And I should have written "obsolete" in quotes, because it's basically very idiomatic sloppy python and no one is saying python is obsolete.
Démodé is a better description.
I thought it was more that python was basically perl with the fun bits removed.
Or to put it another way: python helps you think more like the computer does. Perl helps the computer think more like you do.
Perl was a beautiful name and sounded like "Pearl". Perl 6 is named "Raku" which I find substantially worse naming.
I think those of us drawn to Perl by its beautiful name (and potentially-art syntax...) have long since migrated to Ruby, for better or for worse.
It is still doing large amounts of plumbing all over the Internet....
This reminds me a bit too much of a particular brand of cigarettes.
A small side benefit of tobacco advertising laws is that it no longer holds any such association for me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel_(cigarette)#/media/File%...
#/media/File%3ACamel_cigarettes_logo.png){kind=link}
This one is quite different while still being a monotone camel icon. There's only so much you can change.
And just like that brand of cigarettes, it was a lot of fun back in the day (seriously, Camel did cool stuff), it's frowned on today, people constantly disparage the people who stick with it, and those of us who still use it will stick to it until we die.
At an accelerated pace precisely because of your insistence on sticking with them. It’s not too late to stop.
But I like Perl, and I'm never giving it up.
Just another statistic xP
Ha! It kind of makes sense now!
Perl and cigarette are both unsafe for children
This logo reminds me of Haskell because the pose with the neck and the fore legs sort of look like a lambda, but that's probably just me.
It somewhat resembles the encircled lambda in LOL.
I am one of the person who did the « heavy lifting » on this logo. One of the versions I contributed were actually inspired by the Clojure logo, so, I guess you are both right.
In this discarded version[1], the camel hump is used to create a « dune » in the background. I would have think it was the best, but we discarded it during the review sessions.
[1] https://github.com/metacpan/perl-assets/blob/main/experiment...
First indicator I've seen that Perl is not dead in years.
If you were job hunting over the past few years, it’s possible you’d have seen Booking.com hiring. They reportedly have (or had, I think they were moving away from it) jobs with Perl listed.
Probably the biggest startup-esque company I saw that still used it.
iOS dev with a background in hardware (where I used Perl daily to parse millions of lines of test data). Funny, just used perl the other day to parse an iOS repo for deeplink path handlers. Love it.
but ocaml :(
OCaml called and wants it's logo back.
Perl 6 is still alive?
Its called Raku now, as the language differences in the experimental Perl 6 were enough to warrent it being spun off as a separate project. Perl 5 is still getting updates for quality of life improvements
It’s called Raku
and it has it's own logo
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Camelia.svg#mw-jum...
I like it, all languages should have an official silly little guy.
They should get a new one. The P 6 in the wings relates back to an association that they're explicitly trying to move away from. Ie. the whole justification of the rename to Roku in the first place.
That thing is an abomination.
I remember when it was proposed and I thought it was a joke.
That's why they choose this logo for it.
One of the worst logos out there...
Loving Pearl's new OCaml logo.
I like it. Perl is great
> Since the license is CC-BY, I don't actually know how much ownership matters, but for the time being, I am the camel's steward.
https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/#:~:t....
> BY: credit must be given to the creator.
So, is the "owner" the legal "creator"?
I still love Perl, just saying
So useful, so everywhere, so modern. Two out of three ain't bad
After many years, my head is still exploding from the hundreds of articles trying to pump the next version of perl.
What a disgrace.
Are there like 3 version of perl being developed?
Yeah, it's such a disgrace that people report on updates for software that's still being used and maintained. Linux is even worse about it. They should be writing articles about Multics and ITS instead.
To be clear: this is a logo suggested by a person who isn't affiliated with the perl foundation, nor the roku foundation, so it's not so much new logo as it's a suggestion for a new logo by a community member.
That is like vi getting a logo.
What's the point of ever so slightly changing it?
They've never had an official logo.
They've had an association with camels, stemming from O'Reilly's first book about the language, Programming Perl, with a camel on the cover. And that's trademarked.
The Perl Foundation sidesteps it by having a logo of a (pearl) onion, which is also useless because nobody associates with Perl with onions.
So this is perhaps a third way - it's a camel, it's not the camel that might cause confusion with O'Reilly's book.
> The Perl Foundation sidesteps it by having a logo of a (pearl) onion, which is also useless because nobody associates with Perl with onions.
The onion has been a metaphor for Perl for a couple of decades now. It was in the Camel Book, though I am not sure it was in the first edition. Larry Wall’s annual talk was (is? I stopped following) the State of the Onion. See for example
https://www.perl.com/pub/2006/09/21/onion.html/
https://archive.fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/teachingperl/
It seems there wasn't an official one before; the one used was from or derived from a book which is understandable why it could be problematic.