Would say PHP had more impact than Ruby in the early days. I worked at a place that used Perl with cgi-bin, they did not want to apply the discipline that would make mod-perl reliable so we wound up writing a lot of new stuff in PHP.
PHP has dried up and blown away, so has Ruby but I think we remember Ruby more fondly because RoR had an impact in web frameworks for other languages.
I’d also say Perl was Unix-centric in its thinking while Python embraced Windows early on. Also back when I was using CPAN I don’t remember anything like virtual environments. There is am immediate squee of freedom when you can just install packages and not think about environments but the day you need too conflicting dependencies it is either “game over” or living with painful consequence every time you make a move. It took Python years to get to the point where it is just “uv and chill”
thewebguyd•2mo ago
Definitely PHP had way more impact on the dev side. RoR came much later.
But Perl held on for a little longer in sysadmin circles, even as PHP started taking over web sites. Perl was THE glue code for us ops folks. There's still quite a bit of perl out there too.
Python took over on the ops side rather than Ruby, but that came later still. It wasn't until config management & early DevOps started becoming main stream that Python was replacing perl at scale.
I'll politely disagree. I propose that Java and things like Tomcat or Weblogic Server killed Perl. Perl wasn't a language that let a lot of moderately skilled people work on the same project. Perl didn't have "the server" to deploy to.
Java allowed an army to work on the same project and gave managers "the server" that they could control. Java had doctrines and best practices and ant. TMTOWTDI means that the senior engineer can't bully people with best practices.
silok•2mo ago
Well written imo, and many valuable lessons!
colinstrickland•2mo ago
(author here) Thanks! Almost all of those lessons are much easier with 30+ years of hindsight and counter-examples, of course.
PaulHoule•2mo ago
PHP has dried up and blown away, so has Ruby but I think we remember Ruby more fondly because RoR had an impact in web frameworks for other languages.
I’d also say Perl was Unix-centric in its thinking while Python embraced Windows early on. Also back when I was using CPAN I don’t remember anything like virtual environments. There is am immediate squee of freedom when you can just install packages and not think about environments but the day you need too conflicting dependencies it is either “game over” or living with painful consequence every time you make a move. It took Python years to get to the point where it is just “uv and chill”
thewebguyd•2mo ago
But Perl held on for a little longer in sysadmin circles, even as PHP started taking over web sites. Perl was THE glue code for us ops folks. There's still quite a bit of perl out there too.
Python took over on the ops side rather than Ruby, but that came later still. It wasn't until config management & early DevOps started becoming main stream that Python was replacing perl at scale.