I think Perl today is probably closer to COBOL it was massive for a time, felt like it was everywhere.
Nowadays it is increasingly niche. Like COBOL there is still a lot of perl code out in the wild.
Nowadays it is increasingly niche. Like COBOL there is still a lot of perl code out in the wild.
I wrote a _lot_ of Perl, starting with Perl4 cgi scripts in the mid 90s, then Perl5 and FastCGI and Apache ModPerl. I loved it as a language. But by the time I left that gig in 2008, nobody wanted Perl any more. I mostly drifted around PHP, Python, Ruby, and Javascript for a few years until moving away from full time coding and up (sideways?) into leadership and mentoring roles.
Interestingly I got _into_ the Perl gig when I bailed on a COBOL maintenance gig where it was clear nobody was at all interested in listening to how their 10+ year old custom COBOL warehouse management app (written by the company the boss's sister used to own) running on EOLed Wang minicomputers - was completely incapable of dealing with 4 digit dates for Y2K. I jumped ship to make that somebody else's problem.
Still, if you buy a brand new mac today, most of the executable scripts in the system are written in perl.
You can check it yourself by running:
file -bL /bin/* /usr/bin/* | cut -d' ' -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n
The good thing with Bash etc is that they are so bad you wont and when you do it anyway atleast you get some whip lashes for it.