Perl is a sysadmin language. There's "always" been this tension between sysadmins and developers.

In my mind (developer back then) I'd amateur-psychoanalyze all of that nonsense as some kind of inferiority complex meant to preserve the self image. Needless complexity can be a feature!

And now we are all developers!

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lo_zamoyski an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> some kind of inferiority complex meant to preserve the self image

Or, as the kids say, a flex, but without the sexy connotations.

(Incidentally, I am also reminded of a great quote attributed to Morphy:

"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.")

	▲	chihuahua 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That quote is not very convincing to me. Both parts of it are questionable. Just being able to play chess is not a very high bar at all. Most 6-year-olds can learn it in an hour. Are the Chess hustlers at Washington Square Park all Gentlemen? I don't see being able to play Chess well as any kind of deficiency. It could be that it's just someone's hobby. It doesn't have to mean they spiraled into madness, Bobby Fisher style. (I can play chess, but not well, so I personally don't care about either half of that quote as it applies to me)

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MrDarcy 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In the 2000’s Python was also a sysadmin language.

Edit: But I see your point, Google SRE’s around the late 2000’s reached for Python more than Perl.

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oncallthrow 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think Perl is still more popular even today than Python as a sysadmin language. Late 2000s it certainly was. Maybe Google was different, but across the industry more widely Python was barely used, Perl was used everywhere.

	▲	lysace 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My experience: Sysadmin-driven companies (typically Sun-based) often used Perl. Developer-driven companies used other languages running on cheaper X86 Linux.

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lysace 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

(90s) Yes, but it developed.

	▲	calmbonsai an hour ago \| parent [-]
		As someone who lived through that transition, we used Perl extensively to sysadmin ~30 Solaris and Irix workstations and it was superlative at that. At that time, Guido was still working at CNRI locally to us in Reston, VA and we had several discussions at the local Pyggies (Python User Group) on transitioning over to Python for that work. We were a (mostly) C++/Java shop, but Perl fit into all the other "crevices" beautifully. Python just didn't have enough library support for all of our "swiss-army chainsaw" demands. Still, it was very apparent at the time it would eventually get there and I was enamored with its "one right way" of doing things--even at the bytecode level.