Modern Perl

I've been talking with an acquaintance the other day about Modern Perl -- i.e. the current way of coding Perl.

Perl's very flexibility is evident, since code written in 1994's Perl will still run on 2011's Perl, and yet you can do things today that you couldn't do back then.

This is due to at least two things:

(1) there's an active core development of Perl, which extends the language in useful but backwards-compatible ways (this is possible partly due to the power, flexibility, and dynamism of Perl itself),

and

(2) there's active module development by the community to meet the programming needs of the community. CPAN continues to astound me. There is nothing with the scope and depth of CPAN anywhere for any other programming language.


Languages like Scheme and Python will insist on a core orthogonal operating set. And with some languages (like SmallTalk), you can go a long way on that. But let's face it, you have to get work done sooner or later. Even Common LISP understood that. Perl's amazing library of modules lets you do anything you like... even emulate and embed other languages.


Say you've got a relatively clean, small (and therefore embeddable), C-like language which includes hashtables and some improved control structures, used for scripting small actions. As a loose superset of these sorts of languages, Perl is ideal for aggregating and linking libraries, finding and factoring out common code fragments, and even generating the code and acting as a test harness. In fact, Perl modules could exist today for performing most of these functions -- a Git module could double as a library front end; a text tool could find redundant code; and a template engine could generate code from a JSON structure.

You can't do that with Lua itself. But you could do it all with Perl. And since Perl's syntax descends from C, it's easy to pick up Perl as another tool in your belt.