Perl

"You know what you believe in by observing yourself in a crisis."
— Robert C. Martin, The Clean Coder

Almost three years ago, I wrote a rather presumptuous post about moving away from Perl. I specifically cited Perl's object system as a major reason for dropping it. chromatic called me out on that and for good reason. I also cited maintainability issues with my Perl scripts but those are a result of my own coding and not anything inherent in Perl. (Allowing me to write sloppy code does not mean the same thing as making me write sloppy code.)

While I talked about moving on to Python, I have made almost no progress on this. And when I feel stressed or pressed for time (which is just about always), I always fall back to Perl. It is simply what I know best.

I'm sure I could still correct this. I could immerse myself in Python (or Ruby) and learn either to the point of being able to dream in it. But I haven't done it in the past three years. What likelihood is there that I'll be able to do this in the next three years?

Through observation, and no matter how what rational or irrational reasons I could put forth otherwise, I can only conclude that I believe in Perl.

When doing system scripting, I historically tend to settle on Perl. This is a habit I am trying to break.

Perl is quick and dirty and gets the job done. And the scripts I've written in Perl certainly look like it. I looked at a Perl script I wrote about six years ago and... I have no idea what it's doing! I'm sure I could figure it out if I spent a few minutes going through it (including blank lines, it's only 125 lines long) but that's beyond the point. I am reminded of this joke comparing Perl and Python.

I have some Python scripts already in use. Perl's object model is painful to me and I have a hard time making use of it. So where I've decided to use objects because it makes more sense that way, I have used Python. And I find that the scripts using Python have a little more readability when read in the future. (To verify this, I looked at a script I wrote over seven years ago.)

The vast amount of existing scripts in Perl require me to continue to use it in the near term. However, as I touch the scripts less and less, the less I remember about them and, therefore, the higher the cost if I need to make changes to them for any reason. And since I would like to minimize the amount of time spent trying to reunderstand code, I think moving away from Perl makes the most sense.

What I haven't decided on is what language to use in the future. This will require further testing and gaining more experience with other languages in doing the sort of tasks I use Perl for. However, I will eventually have that experience so Perl's days are numbered.