Ask HN: Is perl still relevant today?

You bet it is! It is still actively developed with new CPAN modules being added every day.

I love perl, it is far and away my favorite language to hack stuff out in. Which is really where this language shines; quick prototypes or duct tape type hacks for pulling data from somewhere, transforming it, and sticking it somewhere else.

While there aren't as many perl centric jobs as there once was for building an entire application with Perl on a large team. That was never really Perls strength. Perl can still play a central role in your toolbox.

Much like Bash, sed, awk, grep, and the litany of other Linux tools, knowing Perl is going to enable you to do things that appear to be magic to those who don't.

We use JavaScript/Node.js, C# and SQL to develop the application my company is building, but I still reach for perl almost every day. Because it makes things easy.

I've used it to generate JavaScript and SQL code from data specification given in Excel or PDF format.

Python comes close to enabling developers to have this kind of magic up their sleeve, but I think Perl's built in CLI flags for implicit loops, helper operators for reading files, first class regex support, and such make whipping up a couple line script to solve some problem much quicker.

Yes, Modern Perl is awesome.

Mojolicious, Moose, cpanm, etc make for a really sweet async backend for a web project while the async frameworks allow for realizing fun cli projects.

Also, the systems level abstraction layer and text processing capabilities is an amazingly relevant way to write portable and useful apps.

The CPAN has decades of cool stuff.

It depends. Chances of getting a job as a Perl developer in most countries are much worse, than they were 10-15 years ago, probably an order of magnitude worse. But as a tool perl5 is rock solid.

Perl 5 is if your in Finance or Banking. There are millions of lines of Perl running things on the back office systems.