Perl still going strong ?

[vcent]

Hi all,

Recently I have been using Autoit in one of my company project and it works great. I used to program in vbscript and batch and web programming.

However we have another project and the project manager asked to write the codes in perl. According to him, perl will be better language in terms of longevity and there are more programmers out there since I might not be the one maintaining it in future. I can see that he also used to be a programmer in the unix platform probably during that time where perl is used very commonly. The new project is still in the windows platform.

Actually I'm not averse of trying out and learning another language. It should be fairly easy to pick up. But of course I will have to struggle with the new syntax for the first few weeks.

My main concern is whether perl is actually used in the current market. I'm not against perl or anything just wondering whether it is worth the effort to learn something which might not be useful in the long run. You know nowadays it's .NET or java. I used autoit because in my previous project, it was written in that.

Just wanna get some comments.

Thanks!

Edited April 18, 2009 by vcent

[jvanegmond]

Perl is on a decline because it's not OO. Python and Ruby are preferred for new applications because of its OO capabilities. For the moment, Perl is still the most commonly used language of those three.

However, your decisions what language you are going to be using should depend on your task at hand, and not your personal ability to use that language. If you are writing general applications for the Windows platform then I do recommend using .NET because it can greatly increase your development speed.

[Xenobiologist]

Every language has its advantages. Getting a job as a developer which works on huge programs in a dev-team, then I would prefer Java or C++. Becoming a sysadmin for some little helper scripts or something, you should go for Perl. (Besides Perl can be OO!)

Mega

[weaponx]

Not one mention of PHP? PHP is a very easy transition from AutoIt and easy to use in general.

[JSThePatriot]

Not one mention of PHP? PHP is a very easy transition from AutoIt and easy to use in general.

Maybe because he wasn't asking about what language he should try next . He simply asked if Perl is worth learning.

I would say that having another language on a resume is worth having, especially if you have actually coded in it. I know a lot of people will put languages on a resume that they have "messed" around with, and have no actual code writing experience, or it is so minor that it's not worth mentioning. Perl isn't dead, and I would say it is far from being dead. I would also recommend assessing what the job requires, and going for the language that's known to do that the best, or quickest, or fewest lines of code, or whatever your measurement matrix might be.

Thanks,

Jarvis

[RobertBedrosian]

Perl IS worth learning. It's syntax is very similar to AutoIt's, it's free, can be used on various platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, AIX and HP-UX), has an enormous Internet presence and support groups, tutorials, hundreds of UDFs, and is great for any kind of web work or desktop applications. It's been around since 1987. Executables can be run on another machine that doesn't have PERL installed since, like AutoIT, the interpreter is incorporated.

http://www.activestate.com/Products/activeperl/index.mhtml

If you're comfortable with AutoIt, you could write simple Perl programs after just a few hours' study.