I've been using perl for 35+ years. As a sysadmin (and hobbyist, tool developer, whatever) it's long been my go-to language for the vast majority of my development efforts.

Over that time I've definitely seen it fading. But in the past year I've seen more concerning issues. The meta cpan website is often sluggish, and right at the moment, it's partly offline (some pages work, others, perhaps less frequently used, are offline).

Some modern Linux distros ship with a crappy set of modules. Like, no LWP. And my experience getting modules for basic functionality is not encouraging. It's very unfortunate for example that LWP doesn't know how to find installed web CAs on standard Linux distributions. Sure, I can make it work, but things just seem to be getting more and more fiddly for basic common functionality.

I've coded python a bit here and there. I've never cared for the language, but most of these concerns are surface and ultimately irrelevant, if the day-to-day experience is better than perl. And yeah, there's a lot to not like about python's day-to-day experience. The multiple confusing approaches to virtual environments and the necessity of understanding them to operate sucks. But when it comes down to it, any language style or design dislike I may have pales in comparison to the question: "is the language sufficiently supported?"

For the first time in the long history of doom-saying about perl, I'm beginning to have doubts if the answer to that question is still "yes". But maybe it's just the frustration of this one particular evening (temporary web problems while trying to find a well-supported multi-platform approach to filesystem events notification that can seamlessly work with the select() call).

submitted by /u/thomasafine
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