Kind of retired now after developing with Perl for the past 20 years, but I still maintain a large Perl code base as a hobby for a club. Just as well as there's little Perl work around in the UK.

The last straw was a mix of things, that `LWP` doesn't support `HTTP2` (so I have to `qx" curl ... "`), the syntax of destructuring a hash-ref, and that no one (in the club) but me knows (or wants to know) Perl, so there is no succession plan.

A large part of the site is Javascript, which made node-js the best migration target as I already half know it

For me, it's a worthy successor to Perl. Its actually quite similar. The language is already way too big (and getting bigger) so that you can look at someone else's code and not understand it 😀 And NPM is like CPAN, lots of similar modules, half of which abandonware, to choose from and you don't know which one to choose

Sure, some things are better... built-in curl (ie fetch/LWP) and convert to/from JSON, JSON like syntax for variables, destructuring objects, private variables and methods in classes, package.json (a config file)

And some much worse ... no `/x` on regex, no `statement if condition`, no auto-vivifying, no log4perl or template toolkit, no "-e file" ). It really pisses me off removing whitespace from regex knowing that /x will be added as a language feature one day. Yes I could of ...

But, overall, more things are better than worse.

In case you try it, even with a convert script, its a lot of work and a little tedious at times going through line by line

It would be great to have a version of Perl with JSON syntax for variables, but I guess, as it would break everything, it is too late.

To all those who have maintained Perl and CPAN modules over the years, THANK YOU.

submitted by /u/Loose_Potential6985
[link] [comments]