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Comment by gpvos | Hacker News Reader

Looks like peak Perl was about 2012-2014. :(

Which is ironic, because even the most ardent Perlies among us were wringing our hands about its inevitable decline well before then.

The rate of increase must have been declining (i.e. rate of rate of increase negative) in order for it to have peaked. This was probably detectable.

"and rate of rate of increase negative"

Are you a politician? Because that's a very round about way of putting it. :P

If the rate of increase is negative, there is an actual absolute decline. Is that want you were meaning to say?

"rate of rate of increase" = "second derivative", I presume. Negative second derivative doesn't necessarily mean a decline, it can be just growth slowing down.

I said rate of rate of increase. The second derivative is negative at a local maximum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_test#Second_derivat...

My mistake, I misread.

...and the sign of the second derivative flips at an inflection point.

That makes me think: is there any instance that the rate of increase of packages or similar metrics ever went below zero (presumably due to removed packages)? I'm not sure if it is generally impossible in typical package manager models though.

If one is paying attention, one can spot early signs of decline in lots of things that seem very strong.

Choose a different metric, and the story will change significantly:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=perl%20t...

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=perl

There are also anecdotes such as this:

https://www.perlmonks.org/bare/?node_id=1225020

Perl6 was supposed to help with this. It has yet to do so.

Nice job. I think these graphs depict Perl's "sphere of influence" in IT with respect to time much better than the original article's depiction.

That's not irony, that's the Rolle's Theorem.

Really more around 1994, just before Perl 5 came out. Perl was a great sh/sed/awk replacement for a while..

What's better 25 years later for that sort of work?

Yeah I learned Perl in 2013 or so and I almost exclusively use it as a better shell+sed for text munging, which is where it excels. In my experience Python is super bad at this compared to Perl or even shell

Still is, for many of us (I only picked it up in 2000).

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