I’m very curious to hear your experience building greenfield projects with perl today. And what are the main advantages you feel that you get from it?

For my company, it's cross-platform and just works. It's file & data capabilities are powerful enough to deal with lots of miniature sized files from the renderer.

Perl just hovers them up and does whatever processing. We did test Python but it just felt clunky in it's habits and felt lacking in terms of performance such as stalling in building a dictionary list of files to work with. Perl may be one of the older languages, but it still holds strong.

If Perl is supported for your $OS your script is guaranteed to execute. Sure, adjustments may have to be made if you're targeting the underside of the rainbow such as Windows but it's trivial for *nix hosts. Migrating from Ubuntu to Debian, BSD? -- 99.9% chance your script will run.

I am bias, in that their isn't anything majority wrong with perl. It was used as the main language back in the 80's for a reason and Perl's ecosystem (cpan) is still pretty comprehensive and still holding weight.

As it's not taught anymore due to newer trends this is causing it's shine to dull and it's overall presence dropping away. I wouldn't disagree that new languages boast optimism in to the future of programming technologies but with perl it has been battle tested and just works.

> Sure, adjustments may have to be made if you're targeting the underside of the rainbow such as Windows but it's non-trivial for *nix hosts.

The rest of your comment makes me think the "non-trivial" was a typo and meant to be something else.

My bad, I got the two mixed. I meant trivial where by it's dead simple to switch over. Thanks for the pointer.

The experience is all good. The toolchain, the speed of both development and execution, the breadth of CPAN and the famous backwards-compatibility all make for a happy development team.

The advantages are the same as they have been for years: cross-platform compatibility, one system to run all aspects of a large project, the flexibility to get the job done in the simplest, most efficient and most maintainable manner.

One caveat: we don't do any MSWin32 development at all. I'm vaguely aware that there are some extra considerations on that O/S but it isn't something which we have to deal with.

Sounds good, thanks. I suppose ai models are really good at generating perl?

I've been surprised. I have a coworker who has a deep industry knowledge but none of it was in Perl, he was reaching for ChatGPT a lot early on and while sometimes it wasn't how I would have written it it wasn't wrong. So I did some experiments and I asked Claude to do things like generate apps using the latest Class syntax which is only 3 years old at this point … it didn't have a problem.

Edit: well it occasionally had a problem where it would confuse things for Moose or Raku … but by and large it wasn't wrong it's just the syntax is new. I know Perl developers who have the same issues.

I'd run from a place that wants to use Perl for new software. Run and never look back.

Whereas I'd run to such a place. I miss it.