I still love when people say nice things about Perl

John Siracusa, on the Diving for Perl episode of the Command Line Heroes podcast:

My hope for Perl 5 is that people don’t dismiss it, because despite all the other more popular languages, there are still problems today to which Perl 5 is the best solution. Very often those are sort of glue type problems. If you find yourself ever writing a shell script, and you’re like, “Well, I’m not going to use my ‘real programming language’ for this.” Whether it’s Python, or Ruby, or whatever. But a shell script can let me connect together a bunch of stuff. Perl is a better tool for that job. It is easier to write a correct Perl script than it is to write a correct shell script.

Having written a few glue tasks with GNU Coreutils and some shell scripts, I agree with that point. Even just glueing together Coreutils can be easier with Perl.

And Perl 6:

That’s the great thing about open source, and programming languages. No one’s going to make you stop. You can just keep working on Perl 6 the same way you have been.

I won’t say whether I installed a fresh build of Rakudo and played around with Perl 6 after listening to the podcast, but — I installed a fresh build of Rakudo and played around with Perl 6 after listening to this episode.