Ask HN: Is it still a good idea to learn Perl for a young developer?

(I'm assuming you mean the latest Perl actually called Perl, and not its successors.)

In a vacuum I wouldn't recommend Perl over first learning the most common languages and technologies of today. I'd gain some familiarity with Python first at a minimum. But it does have some interesting niche advantages you might want to look into more down the road.

Perl 5 has been on the same major version for 30 years now [1], and hence has had a truly enormous amount of training data for LLMs to glomp onto. Since Perl is also primarily thought of as a "scripting-plus" language, something to reach for when Bash isn't cutting the mustard but a 'real program' feels too heavyweight, a lot of its use cases are very much in the LLM one-shot sweet spot. [1]

Perl 5 also has the unique advantage of being installed system-wide by default on more Unix machines than you might expect. It's sitting there quietly on Debian for you right now [2]. It's even the scripting-plus language of choice for OpenBSD!

You would think being "the same" for 30 years would also mean Perl almost accidentally performs really well on modern machines, which have a few orders of magnitude more resources to throw around. I haven't really found this to be that noticeable, though, and if I actually cared about performance in those domains I'd probably stick to the smallest tools I could work with first. Then again, a vanilla Perl 5 program might be even more cross-platform than a vanilla shell script is; shells come and go, but Perl 5 is forever, apparently.

[1]: https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/posts/llms-make-per...

[2]: https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/posts/what-programm...

Depends on your use-cases.

Perl went through a few backwards-incompatible changes and Raku (née Perl 6) and has eroded its library base and user base.

Kind if like the transition from Python 2 to Python 3 stranded part of the ecosystem.

The backwards compatible systems like Linux user space ABI, Java (ruffled feathers with Java 9), TeX/LaTeX and Win32 will stick around the longest due to accreting libraries. Golang is on its way there. Python 3 may have enough important libraries now to also stick with them. If Zig does their job right, then they also have chances.

For Java look at NTS from Java 1.2 days in 2001, where apparently even the old jar files still load on new JVMs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40753417

Perl is a nice language that can do a lot of things very well.

However, for landing a job or doing more modern stuff like AI or web, I'd probably recommend

  Python

No-ish, unless you specifically want to work with Perl codebases (e.g. in bioinformatics). By and large, Python has pretty much replaced Perl for generic scripting work.

Yes, because it does not matter what language a young person learns.

Or an old person.

Learning is a skill acquired through experience.

It is not an optimization problem.

Perl is interesting because it was written by a linguist. It's the only language I know of where you can say "it".

Here's what I mean: I'm talking to another developer. I say, "Read in a line of input. If it ends in a newline, remove the newline." I can talk like that to a developer.

But when I talk to a computer, it says, "Read in a line of input? From where? And put it where? If 'it' ends in a newline? If what ends in a newline?" You can't talk to a computer that way...

Except in Perl. In Perl, you say, "Read in a line of input. I didn't specify where, so read in from the standard place[1]. I didn't specify where to put it, either, so put it in the default variable[2]. Then call chomp, which if I don't specify, will operate on the default variable."

[1] The default input is the files specified as command-line arguments, in order.

[2] The default variable, $_, is used when you don't specify a different variable. $_ plays the linguistic role of "it" - it's what you're talking about when you don't specify what you're talking about.

No