I think it's very widely used for its original purpose, which is a shell replacement. When I need a short script, particularly for text processing, I'll usually reach for Perl now that the Perl 5/Perl 6 thing has been resolved. Just look at the activity on CPAN: https://metacpan.org/recent

There are two heavily developed/used web frameworks for Perl: https://mojolicious.org/ and http://perldancer.org/

Users of Mojolicious: https://github.com/mojolicious/mojo/wiki/Projects-and-Compan...

Yes, absolutely, perl is part of my standard toolbox for some specific tasks, and I'd say I use it at least once a week.

For example, for short scripts to process/massage data - either one shot or in a production pipeline -, it's very expressive and "to the point", especially if you're going to use regexps.

perl is in particular way less verbose than e.g. python when it comes to regexes coz regexes are built into the basic syntax of the language.

OTOH, there are many, many things that are broken in perl, but if I had to cite two things that made me kind of give up on it for new large and mid-level complexity projects these would be: - near impossible to predict perl's handling of "numerical" values - having to type dollar signs to dereference variables

There are Perl interface libraries for everything, so it is often a really great choice, even if it is no longer sexy now that the peak CGI-days have gone.

One thing that I like about Go is that it promotes testing as something that should be required, but in my experience the vast majority of Perl modules also come with very good test-case coverage, it being the source of the TAP format after all!

I've written a few new sites and APIs using the CGI::Application framework over the past few years, and I'll often knock up simple transformation scripts in Perl to glue APIs together and perform ad-hoc transformation of various tools.

Although I've mostly started writing new services in golang I don't feel the need to go back and rewrite stable systems in perl.

Yes. Quite a few tools and products at $dayjob are Perl with active development, multiple large scale revenue numbers attached to them.

I use perl daily in my work on supercomputers and hpc systems. My code helps configure and control them. It helps simplify users work.

No. Perl is not dead by any measure.

These responses are great, glad to hear perl is alive and well. I miss working with it and need to use it more often.

I use (Raku) for shell scripting and system administration. Bash scripts more than 10 lines long scare me.

Yes, working on a greenfield project for one of the largest companies you’ve heard of.

I do. Ideal for deploying on light (edge) servers.

I have lots of programs for loading data from files or sites into a database.

I also have a few Telegram bots written in Perl.

I use it every day for sysadmin stuff.

Many industries use Perl 5 to keep things running. The semiconductor industry, in particular uses a lot of existing, and develops a lot of new, Perl code to do things commercial software cannot.

See also: https://twitter.com/briandfoy_perl/status/132490997885607526...

http://ziprecruiter.com is largely written in perl

Booking.com, a $73 billion company, uses Perl.

It is both "legacy" and "active development".

s/legacy/valuable/g;

Don’t forget Craigslist

There are "real" companies using Perl presently...Booking and DuckDuckGo and others. Looking at Redmonk, Tiobe, other surveys...Perl isn't at the top of the heap by any measure but it also stubbornly refuses to die. I write Perl every day and frankly don't care if people think it is "dead", and even I am surprised at how prominent it figures in language surveys, still.

Most of the key libraries I use are updated regularly. Perl itself is under active development with regular releases.