From Newsgroup: comp.lang.perl.misc
I've programmed in Perl but I'm no Perl-programmer notwithstanding.
Some more or less obvious reasons I see...
Abstraction of diverse Unix utilities' interfaces.
no other language comes close in conciseness when it comes to
text processing and interacting with the OS (filesystem, pipes,..)
.. i could imagine e.g. a library for a language getting there.
Especially a language that is particularly versatile and adaptable to defining DSLs.
Ruby is a good example of that. It mixes Lisp (useful for making DSLs)
and the good parts of Perl (regexps, text processing).
But Ruby only filled (partially) the niche of programming web frameworks.
And I say partially because perl-based cpanel is still being used nowadays.
But for system automation tasks in a Posix OS, when you want to
go above the level of a simple shell script and use complex data
structures, Perl is the only language that fills that gap, any other
language is oververbose (lacks conciseness).
And for whatever reason no other language has filled that gap.
Nobody has even attemped to create another language for the task.
So 37 years after its creation, learning Perl it's still useful.
--
Brevity is the best recommendation of speech, whether in a senator or an orator.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
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