hi, i was interested if perl is still relevant in this day and age. Perl has been on the decline for a very long time now. Perl 6 (now named 'raku) not being backwards compatible with perl 5 code made the already small perl community even smaller by splitting it in half. A good example is lisp with it’s thousands of different dialects.

Is it still worth using or is it bound to legacy software forever? Like cobol.

  • Muffi@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    Even if you’re writing JavaScript, you should be using proper indentation. What an odd thing to keep you from learning it.

    • aard@kyu.de
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      1 year ago

      I write code, indentation is something that the editor just does automatically. If I want to change indent settings I just mark the complete buffer, press tab, and magic happens.

      I’ve been using python for various stuff for a few years now as well, and the indent thing still annoys me.

    • dukk@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      Things get messy though, when you have to break the rules of indentation once in a while or when you have “improper “ indentation. Whitespace is a stupidly messy thing. Indentation should be a style guide, not part of the language semantics.

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      No, it really is horrible. I’m an old timer who learned on FORTRAN and other languages that were still suffering from the punchcard era. Making logic based on character positioning, and adding unnecessary restriction, is just so frustrating and tedious. We got away from such constraints by the 1990’s. Let’s not go back.

      Sure enough, my kid’s Comp Sci teacher tried to use Python because he read how easy it is to use, but no one succeeded because of the formatting. No one succeeded except my kid, who also became a rock star by helping kids reformat. Anyhow, back when computers were primitive and limited, such restrictions were understandable. They’re not anymore.

      Currently I’m a fan of Groovy. All the capability of Java without silly requirements like semi-colons. All the simplicity of Python without silly formatting restrictions