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Where is Perl the lingua franca?

hollosi
Perl is preinstalled on pretty much every Linux and MacOS since time immemorial, and it's pretty much guaranteed to stay preinstalled for the foreseeable future.

Python3 is up and coming, and eventually it will get there, but old machines must die before it can reach ubiquity.

hedora
It will be a long time before it makes sense to use python where longevity/portability matter.

Python breaks backwards compatibility with old scripts every six months or so. In practice, this means you have to port scripts every time you switch machines. Virtual environments sometimes address this issue, but they are hit or miss.

In contrast, perl scripts from 1999 often work unchanged on clean 2022 OS installs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33317932

robertlandrum
More than 20 years ago I developed a tool that would collect basic host information and report it back to a central database. Host name, ip addresses, routes, storage, uptime, uname, etc.

It was written in Perl because it needed to run on SGI Irix, Dec Alpha HP/UX, and whatever Tandem and Stratus used to run, as well as Solaris and Linux. And Perl 5 was already available (if not pre installed) for those systems.

A version of that tool exists at my current company that supports AIX, FreeBSD, Darwin, Solaris, and Linux… versions as far back as 2008.

Seems pretty universal to have an audit tool written in the least common denominator, and while that might not be true of only Perl, it’s probably the only real practical choice.

ferk
Reading this gave me the urge to reply:

awk, bc, and sh are POSIX base utilities, they are literally preinstalled on every unix derivative.

That doesn't make them linga franca, which is what Scarbutt was asking about.

Hell, ed is a POSIX base utility. Does that make ed's command mode the linga franca of text manipulation? Of course not, the thought is preposterous.

If by "lingua franca" we mean "usable almost anywhere"... why would that be preposterous?

I've found extremely useful to rely in tools such as sed, awk, grep or POSIX shell scripting in general. Specially because they are typically installed even in some lightweight vms were perl might not.

https://old.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/ycz9p9/where_is_perl_the_lingua_franca

>>2

Where is Perl the lingua franca?

Back to 2002 please!

>>3
Last time I seen Perl was when I was a little child and downloaded the leaked Half Life 2 source code back in 2003 and tried to compile it. Unfortunately they used Perl in their build system, and learning this christian nonsense was like studying Bible - too much effort. I never managed to compile the game. Perl is the ultimate reverse engineering protection - once you write something, I is basically immutable. BTW, they have jailed the 1337 German Nazi haxx0r, who leaked the sauce code.