What do you typically use perl for? I thought it was most commonly used for scripting and running cgi scripts. I find bash to be much more readable and tend to use it or python for most of my scripts
Lol, you find bash readable? With all its weird ad-hoc constructs? I don’t pretend Perl looks pretty but at least its constructs seem to be consciously designed and do not look bolted on.
At my work place we still maintain a huge web application written in Perl 5. Most of the time if we are in trouble it‘s due to bad architectural designs that are not specific to Perl as a language or ecosystem. Only rarely I stumble over issues like implicit returns, or context sensitive sub routines. Also I hate Perl 5 allowing circular includes. The worst offenders among in-house modules are Perl modules written in a Java-esque style which mostly would have benefitted well from using native Perl features instead of trying to mimick Java programs.
When I arrived I tried to move as much of the front end logic to JS but the backend remained in Perl as most business logic still lives there (and not in the DB). These days we try to implement new features in separate JS or TypeScript services and SPAs that, however, communicate with our REST API that is implemented in Perl/Mojolicious. This way we can hire cheaper JS devs (that never learned Perl) and people can still enjoy React and modern frameworks if they so wish. The most talented ones I try to sucker into little refactoring projects in Perl. Most JS developers that tried got fluent in Perl 5 only after a couple of weeks.
In the future we will try to move more business logic of the "Kernel" into the DB system since Postgres grew much more powerful compared to the time back when the application was invented. I believe this will be our only hope to actually shrink our Perl 5 code base eventually.
What about develop time? how long does it take to deploy a feature?
Ah, how times change.
Perl was the original practical back-end development language for the web. There's a bit of opinion in that, but not a lot; there's not a lot of other contenders, unless you count writing raw C CGI programs which was never that popular.
Perl performance isn't great, but then I don't consider TS/JS performance all that good either. Perl is a cut below JS nowadays because of the JIT that JS has but it's not impractically slow. If it wasn't impractically slow in literally the late 1990s, when it was powering nearly every dynamic site that existed, it sure isn't today.
Go look up some real-world-(ish) performance benchmarks for various web frameworks if you want a real surprise. You might find it'd be hard to sell any scripting language other than PHP(!!!) for a project, if performance actually matters and for some reason you can't use a compiled language. Don't assume the new thing is better, or faster, even if that's its reputation. It may not be entirely earned.
> Lol, you find bash readable?
Note, they didn't say it was readable, just more readable.
Compared to that, bash is really anemic.
Python took Perl's money a bit when it came to scripting, Ruby – clearly influenced a lot by Perl – made big grounds in web apps, once they outgrew CGIs, and of course then we collectively got Javascript Stockholm syndrome.
But seriously, they're all good dogs. We all revel in the Narcicissm of Small Differences, but in the end it wouldn't really matter if we used Perl instead of Python or any other algol-ish imperative OO language with some functional bits.