Can you suggest a real usable pragmatic option to Perl on a Unix scripting environment?
Python and Ruby tried to compete with Perl at the large application level. Interacting with databases and other stuff kind of things.
That still doesn't fulfill the requirements Perl was invented for. Larry Wall invented Perl not because he wanted a Python or Ruby, The Python and Ruby of that time were already present in the form of C. Perl was invented because C couldn't do a certain things well. Namely it never natively blended with the Unix philosophy. It couldn't do 'Text' properly. It could not be what awk, sed, grep and other Text processing utilities combined together would be.
Besides all that, Perl is a natural evolution to bash, shell, sed, awk, tr, cat and many many other text processing utilities combined together working together in a very large application. That continues to remain Perl's biggest and most distinctive unbeatable advantage so far.
Perl is a natural extension to Unix, and it has evolved to now be capable of doing nearly everything. If the name Perl would not have been given to Perl, it would probably Unix programming language. Think of it in that terms.
Do you know why despite so much trolling, bashing and criticism Perl receives. It still manages to grow and thrive year after year, decade after decade? Its because Perl is same as C, Lisp, SQL etc. Its a first time done right language.
Anything that is likely to replace Perl, will be a bad replacement to Perl. Or at maximum will be or look like Perl(Eg Perl 6).
To kill Perl you may have to kill the whole Unix philosophy. Because that is what Perl is. Its a natural extension to Unix.
Perl is here to stay for decades to come.
Every new generation of programmers will discover Perl and use it just like how every new generation of programmers discover and use C and Lisp. That is what enables stuff like DuckDuckGo to be built in Perl.
