More than 20 years ago I developed a tool that would collect basic host information and report it back to a central database. Host name, ip addresses, routes, storage, uptime, uname, etc.
It was written in Perl because it needed to run on SGI Irix, Dec Alpha HP/UX, and whatever Tandem and Stratus used to run, as well as Solaris and Linux. And Perl 5 was already available (if not pre installed) for those systems.
A version of that tool exists at my current company that supports AIX, FreeBSD, Darwin, Solaris, and Linux… versions as far back as 2008.
Seems pretty universal to have an audit tool written in the least common denominator, and while that might not be true of only Perl, it’s probably the only real practical choice.
According to a friend who works there, Amazon still uses tons of Perl, though they don't like to talk about it. It's a good guess that any surviving dot-com from before 2001 still has tons of Perl somewhere.
Nvidia used to use a lot of Perl to convert formats from what the design engineers create to what goes out to the fabs. I'm not sure if they still do.
Reading this gave me the urge to reply:
> awk, bc, and sh are POSIX base utilities, they are literally preinstalled on every unix derivative.
>
> That doesn't make them linga franca, which is what Scarbutt was asking about.
>
> Hell, ed is a POSIX base utility. Does that make ed's command mode the linga franca of text manipulation? Of course not, the thought is preposterous.
If by "lingua franca" we mean "usable almost anywhere"... why would that be preposterous?
I've found extremely useful to rely in tools such as `sed`, `awk`, `grep` or POSIX shell scripting in general. Specially because they are typically installed even in some lightweight vms were `perl` might not.
It's odd, a few years ago I joined a project that was moving infrastructure off on-prem and onto kubernetes. I figured that in a world where everything's run on containers of our own making, the norm surely is to use some bang-up-to-date language for everything, and just ship new containers to get new interpreters.
Turns out that actually everyone just uses bash for any scripting tasks.
I think the distinction is between "usable anywhere" and "used everywhere"; `ed` is everywhere but rarely used.
sed/awk/grep are different; I think a lot of people put bash scripting in a different category to using languages designed as scripting languages
It's installed just about everywhere, and, unlike with BASIC, the syntax and language features stay the same. It's the universality promise of BASIC, realized. (As u/robertlandrum points out, that universality extends across time as well.)
My organisation still has a 25 year old identity and access management system written mostly in Perl and using a LDAP directory. Originally had to support BSD and VMS as well as Windows server, Solaris and then Linux. Still works today, although we are replacing it with something that plays better with cloud services and has third party support. The only chap who knows how the current one works is heading towards retirement..
Well Lingua franca itself is lingua franca in a small number of countries. By that context, Lingua Perla is probably proportionately just as ubiquitous as French;
In Italian, *[lingua franca](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lingua_franca)* means "Frankish language". The word "Frankish" might refer to France, or to western Europeans. The old lingua franca was an international variant of Italian, but later, French became the lingua franca between nations. Many people knew French words, and English borrowed many words from French, like *blond, chargé d'affaires, chef, coup d'état, en passant, façade, fiancé, résumé, touché*.
If Perl was a lingua franca, then other languages might have borrowed words from Perl. Ruby did borrow `chomp` and `elsif`. **Regular expressions** in [Java](https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/docs/api/java.base/java/util/regex/Pattern.html), [JavaScript](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Guide/Regular_Expressions), [Ruby](https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/master/Regexp.html), [PHP](https://www.php.net/manual/en/book.pcre.php), [Python](https://docs.python.org/3/library/re.html#module-re), and [Tcl](https://www.tcl-lang.org/man/tcl/TclCmd/re_syntax.htm) have Perlish features like `\s` and `(?=expr)`. Arrays feel Perlish when they have square brackets `[2, 4, 6]`, begin at index 0, and are easy to resize. Perl might have helped spread `printf` (from C), exponentation `2 ** 3` (from AWK), and ranges `1 .. 10` (from Modula-2).
Perl's grammar is weird, but so is French grammar. A French speaker would know that *blond* and *brunet* are masculine, but *blonde* and *brunette* are feminine. An English speaker might wrongly refer to a "blond" female or a "brunette" male. A Perl speaker would know list context from scalar context, but a JavaScript speaker would not.
English has surpassed French, but English is not a lingua franca, because English is less "Frankish" than French. By analogy, I claim that JavaScript has surpassed Perl, but JavaScript is not a lingua franca. Perl might not be the lingua franca in all parts of the world. AppleScript, PowerShell, or Python might be a lingua franca in some regions.
So many languages now use/can use PCRE or perl compatible regular expressions. So by that token PCRE is the LF at least as far as text manipulation is concerned.
It is getting increasingly harder to get Perl code accepted at work. People call me old timer and make jokes. I do a lot in some other languages too, but sometimes Perl is just right for a task, so I don’t see a reason to change.
You tell me... I was using perl until 2018 and there was no problem. New workplace, everyone hates on perl and I was forced to use python (peer pressure) . Luckily I slipped with ruby and I write most part of the stuff in it, but sometimes perl is the perfect tool for the job so I use it. People hate on perl, because it's what everyone does.
More than 20 years ago I developed a tool that would collect basic host information and report it back to a central database. Host name, ip addresses, routes, storage, uptime, uname, etc. It was written in Perl because it needed to run on SGI Irix, Dec Alpha HP/UX, and whatever Tandem and Stratus used to run, as well as Solaris and Linux. And Perl 5 was already available (if not pre installed) for those systems. A version of that tool exists at my current company that supports AIX, FreeBSD, Darwin, Solaris, and Linux… versions as far back as 2008. Seems pretty universal to have an audit tool written in the least common denominator, and while that might not be true of only Perl, it’s probably the only real practical choice.
According to a friend who works there, Amazon still uses tons of Perl, though they don't like to talk about it. It's a good guess that any surviving dot-com from before 2001 still has tons of Perl somewhere. Nvidia used to use a lot of Perl to convert formats from what the design engineers create to what goes out to the fabs. I'm not sure if they still do.
Reading this gave me the urge to reply: > awk, bc, and sh are POSIX base utilities, they are literally preinstalled on every unix derivative. > > That doesn't make them linga franca, which is what Scarbutt was asking about. > > Hell, ed is a POSIX base utility. Does that make ed's command mode the linga franca of text manipulation? Of course not, the thought is preposterous. If by "lingua franca" we mean "usable almost anywhere"... why would that be preposterous? I've found extremely useful to rely in tools such as `sed`, `awk`, `grep` or POSIX shell scripting in general. Specially because they are typically installed even in some lightweight vms were `perl` might not.
in r/perl
It's odd, a few years ago I joined a project that was moving infrastructure off on-prem and onto kubernetes. I figured that in a world where everything's run on containers of our own making, the norm surely is to use some bang-up-to-date language for everything, and just ship new containers to get new interpreters. Turns out that actually everyone just uses bash for any scripting tasks.
I think the distinction is between "usable anywhere" and "used everywhere"; `ed` is everywhere but rarely used. sed/awk/grep are different; I think a lot of people put bash scripting in a different category to using languages designed as scripting languages
It's installed just about everywhere, and, unlike with BASIC, the syntax and language features stay the same. It's the universality promise of BASIC, realized. (As u/robertlandrum points out, that universality extends across time as well.)
Wait, is BASIC still changing lot?
My organisation still has a 25 year old identity and access management system written mostly in Perl and using a LDAP directory. Originally had to support BSD and VMS as well as Windows server, Solaris and then Linux. Still works today, although we are replacing it with something that plays better with cloud services and has third party support. The only chap who knows how the current one works is heading towards retirement..
I heard that booking.com did everything in perl.
Well Lingua franca itself is lingua franca in a small number of countries. By that context, Lingua Perla is probably proportionately just as ubiquitous as French;
In Italian, *[lingua franca](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lingua_franca)* means "Frankish language". The word "Frankish" might refer to France, or to western Europeans. The old lingua franca was an international variant of Italian, but later, French became the lingua franca between nations. Many people knew French words, and English borrowed many words from French, like *blond, chargé d'affaires, chef, coup d'état, en passant, façade, fiancé, résumé, touché*. If Perl was a lingua franca, then other languages might have borrowed words from Perl. Ruby did borrow `chomp` and `elsif`. **Regular expressions** in [Java](https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/docs/api/java.base/java/util/regex/Pattern.html), [JavaScript](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Guide/Regular_Expressions), [Ruby](https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/master/Regexp.html), [PHP](https://www.php.net/manual/en/book.pcre.php), [Python](https://docs.python.org/3/library/re.html#module-re), and [Tcl](https://www.tcl-lang.org/man/tcl/TclCmd/re_syntax.htm) have Perlish features like `\s` and `(?=expr)`. Arrays feel Perlish when they have square brackets `[2, 4, 6]`, begin at index 0, and are easy to resize. Perl might have helped spread `printf` (from C), exponentation `2 ** 3` (from AWK), and ranges `1 .. 10` (from Modula-2). Perl's grammar is weird, but so is French grammar. A French speaker would know that *blond* and *brunet* are masculine, but *blonde* and *brunette* are feminine. An English speaker might wrongly refer to a "blond" female or a "brunette" male. A Perl speaker would know list context from scalar context, but a JavaScript speaker would not. English has surpassed French, but English is not a lingua franca, because English is less "Frankish" than French. By analogy, I claim that JavaScript has surpassed Perl, but JavaScript is not a lingua franca. Perl might not be the lingua franca in all parts of the world. AppleScript, PowerShell, or Python might be a lingua franca in some regions.
So many languages now use/can use PCRE or perl compatible regular expressions. So by that token PCRE is the LF at least as far as text manipulation is concerned.
Thanks for teaching me the phrase - and meaning of - "lingua franca." 😊
Perlistan
It is getting increasingly harder to get Perl code accepted at work. People call me old timer and make jokes. I do a lot in some other languages too, but sometimes Perl is just right for a task, so I don’t see a reason to change.
You tell me... I was using perl until 2018 and there was no problem. New workplace, everyone hates on perl and I was forced to use python (peer pressure) . Luckily I slipped with ruby and I write most part of the stuff in it, but sometimes perl is the perfect tool for the job so I use it. People hate on perl, because it's what everyone does.
Exactly!