how well is perl doing as a language, how long is it going to be
around for? not trolling but i've started asking myself questions on
the benifits in the long run of using perl of unix administration,
just is it as popular as i originally thought it was???? because my
mate said it was dying
For *nix sys admin tasks, I can't think of a better language to use. I
don't know of a single good *nix sys admin that doesn't use Perl more
often than anything else (unless a simple command does what you want
already). Shell scripting can be a hassle and Perl makes it a lot more
powerful and precise and makes it often easier, depending on what
you're doing. What could possibly replace Perl for such a thing and be
better? Everyone has their language of choice, but who would make an
effort to write admin scripts in Python, Ruby or PHP just to say Perl
isn't as popular? Of course it is. Look on usenet, it's one of the
more busy groups when most others are dead or dying. Only the Ruby
group is maybe on par with the traffic the Perl group gets. Use
whatever you like, anything that offers a CLI interface (Perl, Ruby,
PHP, Python, etc.) is fine, use what you know and like best. Like I
said, I don't know of any good sys admin that either doesn't know Perl
(and the one's that don't wish they did). There's always some fool
that will claim it's dying, just ignore those people.
