Because it works. Scripts/software that works does not experience bit rot. As long as it works, people will continue to use it.
Edit: OK, fine. It seems the downvoters are convinced that the code does in fact experience bit rot, and spoils with time. Probably like fish.
As a counterpoint, I think we can both agree that writing production software in one of the toy languages that pops up on HN frontpage every day is a bad idea. Writing in a language that is old enough that it has become niche has many of the same issues. It doesn't really matter whether the software is poorly understood because the language is new enough to be niche or old enough to be niche; the outcome is the same.
Why don't you specify this single reason you allude to?
I think there are plenty of reasons, and they work to reinforce each other.
> a reason
Singular, in English that means there's a single reason.
> I think there are plenty of reasons, and they work to reinforce each other
Care to expand on this?
Genuinely interesting, a thread where people complain about a language and they are so careless with the language they use to try and get their point across...
Not particularly since you seem very combative... but here it goes, from the top of my head: without Moose/Moo etc OOP is (was? no clue, I don't follow development any more) just cumbersome and archaic (and with it you'll run into strange things when you hit errors), support in modern IDEs is lacking, there are few developers and therefore a smaller community, it's often not among the officially provided SDKs etc. Those are all interconnected. You can't easily hire Perl developers. Nobody wants to pay large sums to compete about the few there are to provide an SDK for a language that is on its way out. Nobody wants to work with a language that's not really supported by businesses. There's no large community to improve tools. Of course, I don't mean literally nobody, just very little. It's a vicious circle.
I liked Perl (it has a special place in my heart), I've written a ton of stuff in Perl, some of it I still support, but I can't say that I've missed it in the last five or so years since I've stopped actively writing it. I still occasionally log into the perl-focused community I used to frequent and they are still getting about a post a week. I never gave Perl6 a chance, simply because it would be a switch to another language where knowing Perl didn't really transfer, so I might as well go where the music plays. And yeah, CPAN-modules are nice and all, but a lot of it always looked to me as if written for a contest of clever code, not to be read & understood easily.
Asking people to back up what they say is 'combative'? Nothing else in this post has a ring of truth either
Would I write an API in perl? Nope.
Would I write something that massages the data that APIs spit out and processes it, drops into a queues, generates jobs, etc? Absolutely.
Mostly because I will write a few hundred lines of code for existing CPAN modules to solve the problem that I have, letting me to move on to doing something else. I like boring tools that just work. In 99.99% of the times the tools/whatever you are writing is not inline, does not need to have amazing performance. It just need to work and be braindead simple. Perl excels at that. I still daily use code that I wrote over 25 years ago and modified it a couple of times since that point ( integrating git ).
Edit: Can't reply below so I will reply here:
Re: I would not write an API in perl.
> I see you have not tried Mojolicious.
I have seen it, tried it, got excited about it and immediately came to my senses because I asked myself "Why on earth would I build or advise people to build an API in perl? It is slow. It is bad for concurrency. It probably has a pile of corner cases that I'm or some other people are going to discover. If I need to ingest something via web I will throw a simple nodejs app. Millions played with it actively in a "web" sphere, and hit most of the corner cases. There are thousands articles on stackoverflow and we have dozens of skeleton servers that already have all the needed foundations, including federated databases that support live password changes, traffic sharding, online promotion and switches, dynamic reloads, do-at-most-once queues, do-at-least-once queues, etc etc. Why would I want to reinvent all of this when the job of the API is to get the stuff and if the question cannot be answered via a couple of lookups push the request to a worker?"
Re: CPAN in 2019
> n 2019, I can only think you haven't looked around much recently.
Maybe. I have not seen it to be the case two months ago.
In 2010, that may have been true.
In 2019, I can only think you haven't looked around much recently.
I see you have not tried Mojolicious.
Why not? There are CPAN frameworks that make it a breeze.
The most efficent "modern" web development I have done has been with Perl.
Mojolicious, Catalyst, Dancer – take your pick.
Yes, Perl's threading support is terrible, and I do wish it was as effortless as in Raku. But you'd be surprised how often you actually only need an event loop and non-blocking implementations, and for the rest of the time there's Mojo::IOLoop->subprocess or IO::Async::Function to provide a thread-like model with efficient forking.
Because there have not been million people with different levels of skills poking and prodding Mojolicious into good, bad, ridiculous, disgusting, ugly and beautiful uses, posting on Stackoverflow, getting answers, getting smacked down, or getting those things marked as known bugs. I use code to achieve a business objective, not to create a beautiful code or use a wonderful framework.
Just framework itself is not enough - it needs to have skeletons for services that would handle common edge cases -- database failures with automated switch to standby, internal request queues with retries, configurable. Clean interface to external configurations that should be changeable in-flight without a restart; patterns for interfacing with other systems, etc.
> Yes, Perl's threading support is terrible,
Some of the basic crypto modules and modules that use those basic crypto modules are not thread safe. In 2019. Modules that were written a decade ago. I'm not interested in figuring out those bugs in production.
I wrote a pretty complex API using Dancer. I'm not going there again.
Perl is an old language, pre OOP. It's a language from the 90s, when everyone was hacking together code not knowing what the future would be like. There is a lack of organization. Perl is like C in syntax, features, and in speed. Python is like C++. Every failing you can find in Perl stems from it being a PP language first, from dirty code to kids not learning it in college.
Raku attempts to address every failing of Perl, yet be better than Python. If it succeeds, who knows, but I hope it gets at least a chance to make something of itself.
Perl was the popular language once upon a time ago. But it stagnated while new technology came in to replace the old.