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Comment by FrustratedMonky | Hacker News Reader

Is PERL dead yet?

I asked ChatGPT -- Please estimate the popularity of these languages, relative to the most popular one (that gets 100%). Base your answer on community activity on different platforms (stackoverflow, reddit, hacker news, dev.to, github) and the number of books available and sold: COBOL, Perl, PHP, BASIC, TCL, ColdFusion.

Estimated popularity:

    PHP: 100% (reference)
    Perl: 30%
    COBOL: 25%
    BASIC: 10%
    TCL: 8%
    ColdFusion: 5%

(I consider all of these dead, or, "in maintenance mode")

Why php though? Php is as old as java and very popular and constantly updated.

we need a reference... and PHP is the biggest language that has clearly better options available in it's space.

JS is not too pretty either, but I understand many believe it's the only lang the browser understands.

PERL is undead.

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