Very good, actually. But you have to nudge them slightly. Tell them you prefer the modern version of the language, with gradual typing† and function signatures, and you'll get very good results. Perl interpreter comes standard on modern OSes and due to permissive licensing and impeccable backwards compatibility you can always assume you deal with very modern versions of Perl.
replyI write Perl scripts that are 10-100 lines of code, and at this size Perl is a Strictly Better Bash: better syntax, some type checking, better text support, and still effortless calls to external processes: essentially you put a command with arguments in backticks, and you get it's output. Ruby can do it too, but not all systems have it. Python is another obvious choice but calling external commands in it is annoying. I also use Perl for some one-liners as a better `sed` for text replacements.
† Perl nowadays have TypeScript-style type checking for function parameters. So, while the syntax is wild sometimes, the language is much better than it used to be.
Are you talking about perl 5 or perl 6?
replyA few years ago; perl 6 renamed itself to 'raku', so the perl 5 folks can continue to improve/maintain the original 'perl'.
reply5 has this. There are modules that get you to function signatures and type constraints. It's all opt-in and, as was said, you have to nudge LLMs to use it, but they can and the results are indeed better.
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replyCodex for some reason sometimes runs Perl instead of Python to work with local files
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