I would love to see more innovation in scripting languages. Nothing (I've seen) comes as close to perl for swizzling together a decent, capable, handy programming language with a variety of system binaries & other shell scripts.
There's a couple efforts like shell.js[1] or the far simpler/more-contemporary zx[2] to give shell-scripting like ease to js. zx's core is just at tagged template string for running system() calls, basically, ex: $`echo 2+2`. I still find the experience pretty sub-par compared to how shell & scripting first languages like Perl are.
Perl is just super powerful, keeping a foot in a more user-land like environment, versus the totalizing experience of libraries. Why do you need to pick a http client library to use when everyone is already quite intimate with curl & it's already on the system? Somehow coding keeps taking more turf, but I feel like Perl's scripting was extremely glorious & largely un-reproduced. Perl is still some of the best "glue" the planet has seen. And glue, as we've read a couple times on HN[3][4], & which I agree with, is really important, dominates what we build.
To the topic itself, as a Debian user, I appreciate Perl, but I wish it weren't on my OS taking up ~20MB of space & being more & more offbeat, but it's probably never going away. Not sure why it irks me that my computers will all need that ~20MB of Perl + Debian perl libraries. And it is pretty cool how debuggable & visible the Debian tools often are, because they're scripts, not compiled programs, by & large. But there's a lot of operators to lookup & a lot of implicit variables to remember in Perl programs, and it's a reminder how offbeat Perl is, every time I poke my head in.
There's a couple efforts like shell.js[1] or the far simpler/more-contemporary zx[2] to give shell-scripting like ease to js. zx's core is just at tagged template string for running system() calls, basically, ex: $`echo 2+2`. I still find the experience pretty sub-par compared to how shell & scripting first languages like Perl are.
Perl is just super powerful, keeping a foot in a more user-land like environment, versus the totalizing experience of libraries. Why do you need to pick a http client library to use when everyone is already quite intimate with curl & it's already on the system? Somehow coding keeps taking more turf, but I feel like Perl's scripting was extremely glorious & largely un-reproduced. Perl is still some of the best "glue" the planet has seen. And glue, as we've read a couple times on HN[3][4], & which I agree with, is really important, dominates what we build.
To the topic itself, as a Debian user, I appreciate Perl, but I wish it weren't on my OS taking up ~20MB of space & being more & more offbeat, but it's probably never going away. Not sure why it irks me that my computers will all need that ~20MB of Perl + Debian perl libraries. And it is pretty cool how debuggable & visible the Debian tools often are, because they're scripts, not compiled programs, by & large. But there's a lot of operators to lookup & a lot of implicit variables to remember in Perl programs, and it's a reminder how offbeat Perl is, every time I poke my head in.
[1] https://github.com/shelljs/shelljs
[2] https://github.com/google/zx
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27486706 https://blog.metaobject.com/2021/06/glue-dark-matter-of-soft...
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27880183 https://www.oreilly.com/radar/thinking-about-glue/