Ruby and Its Neighbors: Perl (opens in new tab)

> Although it was basically the most common language to create dynamic webpages in like, 2000, a higher-level framework never emerged, and Perl therefore lost share to Python and Ruby. Python and Ruby were also, in different ways, easier to use than Perl.

No, 3 major perl web frameworks emerged. One is Dancer, the Sinatra equivalent. Then Catalyst, the old MVS monster. And then the modern slim version of it, Mojolicious.

Perl is also easier to use and deploy than python and ruby, as upgrades don't break your scripts and dependencies. In ruby it's better, but native extensions still break all the time. And python is just too broken to be fixable ever. Worse is better.

This article gives a great background to Ruby's syntax origins in perl. Also, with a series of "What happened to perl?" articles appearing lately (maybe just one on HN) it gives a nice retrospective on both good parts and quirks of the language. That perl was eagerly adopted in many toolchains vital to linux distributions (such as Gnu autotools) and is a deep dependency through the IT world today is a testament to the strong fundamentals of the language beyond the oft-flamed syntax pecadilos.

To my thinking, the tides of perl bashing in articles and comments is a sign of the vitality of the language (all publicity is good publicity) especially with the continued development and renaissance of the language -- new language features such as in-core OO, mature tools such as the Perl Data Language -- along with cultural commitment to on-boarding and mentoring in the perl community.

The part about Smalltalk's influence on Ruby is a good callout. Smalltalk has influenced many languages: Python's 'everything is an object (like Ruby)'; Objective-C's message sending syntax; JS's 'self'; and probably Scala. Not sure what else (besides Ruby of course).

As for Perl, I think besides Ruby probably PHP (began as "Personal Home Page Tools — a set of Perl-like macros") and JS (expressions, variable pragmas, loose semantics) have the clearest influence.

Basically Ruby is Perl without the wizardry.

>my favorite piece of random Perl lore – Perligata or Perl in Latin.

I prefer tlhInganHol::yIghun. Or Perl in Klingon.

In series there's also a comparative piece to Smalltalk and Lisp. The Smalltalk post was discussed here recently.