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I'm not convinced. Which languages have Perl influenced, really? All the things that other languages seem to draw from Perl could just as well have come from e.g. awk, Smalltalk, and other languages that came before Perl.

Most of the uniquely Perly things (topicalisation, autovivification, regexes in the language syntax, context sensitivity) haven't been picked up by other languages.

The only really Perly thing that was picked up elsewhere is CPAN, but that's not part of Perl-the-programming-language but Perl-the-community.

(Oh I guess PHP picked up sigils from Perl but misunderstood them and that was the end of that.)



Perl's big influence is Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions, to the point many younger people just assume "regular expression" means "pcre".

In terms of direct language impact, Ruby code rarely shows that these days, but it was essentially designed in a way to easily migrate from Perl ways


Regexes in syntax / regex literals made it into JS and Ruby (at least).


Besides the regex literals, Ruby does have sigils of a sort (@ and $) but with different meanings. Also the quotelike operators (q, qx, qw becomes %q, %x, %w).


> Which languages have Perl influenced, really?

Raku is a direct descendant.


Did Raku see any uptake from people outside the shrinking Perl world?




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