Perl Haters Need to Shut Up and Learn It
Perl is THE Industry Standard For Regular Expressions
Hating on Perl has become something of a trend these days. There are even job posts that hate on Perl as a stupid, uninformed, moronic joke:
“Have a healthy disdain for Perl”
That company also pushes Python and proprietary Java tools, uses browser tracking, links over 50 different style sheets, and has a horribly blinding white web site design full of <div> soup. That says everything you need to know about their cluelessness enough to dismiss them and find a company that actually knows what they are doing.
But lucky for you this helps you separate the dogmatic, uninformed, 1x, wannabe haters and script-kiddy companies from the 10x engineers you should prefer to work with and learn from. Here’s why.
Perl Compatible Regular Expressions / PCRE
Perl set the modern industry standard for regular expressions way back in 1987. The resulting PRCE library in 1997 has remained a “more powerful and flexible” replacement to other regular expression engines in most high-level projects and languages today. Some directly use the libpcre library while others like Rust use a syntax that “is similar to Perl-style regular expressions.”
In other words, almost everything now uses Perl regular expressions — the single most important reason Perl was created in the first place.
Perl is Everywhere
Perl is installed by default on every major Unix and Linux system since 1997. The only scripting languages that can claim more ubiquity than that are the shell scripting languages and awk — the language Perl was specifically created to replace.
This is the main reason why good hackers still learn Perl. They know when they get onto any Unix or Linux system that it is likely to be the most powerful tool available without pushing anything to the target system. Ruby ain’t gonna be there. Java ain’t gonna be there. And if Python is there it’s a complete crap shoot that it will be a useful version and God knows Python sucks for command-line scripting.
Perl is Better Than Sed and Awk
Sorry boomers, sed and awk are dead, and perl really nailed the coffin shut. Unless you need to write truly POSIX code that will run on any Unix system ever made you just don’t need them. Anyone telling you otherwise has no idea what they are talking about.
Once upon a time — decades ago — sed and awk were the only POSIX way to write good shell code that would work everywhere. But that was a long time ago. Since then the default Bash shell far exceeds the needs for most and if not perl is always there to take over.
Perl was created specifically to provide a better alternative to the ancient defunct Unix tools like awk and sed and overwhelmingly succeeded at this goal. This is why Perl was created with such an intense priority on good regular expressions. Try working with basic regular expression field replacements in sed or awk requiring crazy escapes to realize how much perl blew them away. Why on Earth would you waste time with crappy inferior tools?
The next time someone tells you to use sed or awk instead of perl just ignore them and move on. They have revealed their inferior skills and relevance.
Stop Blaming Perl for Being So Amazing
The fact that Perl blew up in the 90s gives a lot of insight into just how amazing this awk replacement really is. First of all, it was never intended to become a massive systems programming language. But people decided to use it that way because the alternatives at the time were ancient Unix shell or C. Perl was the only scripting language that provided what people needed between those two.
The result was that this little awk replacement language became the back-end web processing language on literally millions of computers all over the world. It would be about a decade before anything even remotely better came along, and people will still debate that PHP and Python were ever better.
Python Never Replaced Perl
Keep in mind that Python was created from the ground-up to fit that specific niche between C and shell for middle-ware and systems automation and systems programming from the beginning. It was designed to be that from the start. Python was never an awk replacement and continues not to be.
Want proof? Try to do anything with Python from the command line. Python is a complete and total disaster as a command-line language because it was never meant to be. The ridiculously stupid decision to use significant white space permanently handicapped it. So stop comparing Python and Perl! Doing so just proves how incredibly junior you are and makes experienced engineers wince at your level of ignorance. Python and Perl serve two completely different needs.
The fact that Perl — a humble little sed and awk replacement — managed to become the dominant web language and remained so for more than a decade without any contenders proves its relevance and value and that it far exceeds the value and usefulness sed, awk and python for anything starting out on the command line. People ought never to forget that.
Here’s a little taste of Perl’s power. Can you figure out what this does? Here’s a hint: it comes from ~/.vimrc. Note how the reason it is hard to read has nothing to do with Perl itself, but the fact that it uses a very powerful regular expression substitution that would make sed, awk, or python cry like a baby.
autocmd vimleavepre *.md !perl -p -i -e 's,\[([^\]]+)\]\(\),[\1](https://duck.com/lite?kae=t&q=\1),g' %Much of Perl’s “line noise” is caused by effective use of regular expressions, not Perl. Regexs are dense and hard to understand by nature. That’s not Perl’s fault. In fact, Perl is the only language that allows the /x addition to allow a complex regular expression to be written out with plenty of comments and white space making it easier to read.
Inferior Engineers Criticize Perl
While regular expressions can certainly be overused — especially in production code where a substring match would do just fine — not understanding the purpose and power of regular expressions is a major skills gap.
Those who criticize Perl for being “read only” do so because they have inferior skill and lack either the capacity or motivation to learn it. Hating calms their egos distracting them from realizing the harsh reality of just how inferior and lazy they really are — you know, the kind of anti-autodidactic incompetent engineer you never want to work with or hire, let alone be yourself. You are better than that.