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0 pointskbenson11y ago0 comments

>>"most of the other languages were modeled on it."

>Having a regexp library is hardly "modeling a language on Perl".

I don't know about most, but both PHP and Ruby were heavily influenced by Perl. If you've used both, this should be apparent, if not, you can easily find references on record to the effect. The original statement may have been a bit hyperbolic, but in context and with constraints something similar isn't unwarranted. E.g. "Perl was very influential to many of the most popular scripting languages today."

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DonHopkins11y ago

It's true that most popular scripting languages today were influenced by the same scripting (and other types of) languages that Perl was influenced by. Namely shell scripting and Lisp.

What I object to are the terms "most" and "modeled on", each of which are hyperbolic, but taken together are "hyperbolic squared" (to stretch the mathematical metaphor).

And Perl 6 hasn't had much influence at all, since nobody's been able to use it for anything practical in the last 15 years.

At best, Perl 6 has influenced people to learn other languages than Perl, which is a good thing, I suppose.

ab5tract11y ago

You are really reaching to say that sed/awk/shell and Lisp were more of an influence on either Ruby or PHP. Ruby has all the same special variables as Perl, FFS! PHP was originally written in Perl. But somehow awk was the bigger influence in either case?

Sorry, but your retcon fails. Even Scala admits it has Perl influences -- http://perl8.org.

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