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Comment by leejo | Hacker News Reader

> I'm surprised to learn that Perl is still used.

For this year's London Perl & Raku workshop I shortlisted 70 companies to look for sponsorship. That was with minimal research and effort. These ranged from long term ("legacy") users of Perl to startups. From small companies to very large and profitable fintechs. I cover this briefly in the talk I gave at the end of the workshop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el7qHRpEDeE

Yes, there is far less Perl than there was 20 years ago. But Perl was everywhere at one point, and the halflife of programming languages is long so it's still in a lot of places. Programming languages don't die, they just stop being talked about in favour of the shiny new ones.

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> Programming languages don't die, they just stop being talked about in favour of the shiny new ones.

You're largely preaching to the choir, I don't disagree with anything you said.

As a web application developer who got started professionally in the 1990s, I not only vividly remember Perl being everywhere, I actively wrote a lot of it.

However, in my more recent experience, it is more likely to hear people talk about COBOL, FORTRAN or C++ than it is to discuss Perl. All of those languages predate Perl.

Java also still gets a ton of discussion and it's not shiny and new anymore.

Most of us who spent time writing and maintaining Perl in the 1990s were all too willing to abandon it in favour of other languages with similar features, not because they were shiny and new but because of major pain points with Perl (it earned the meme that it's a write-only language). In my opinion, Perl's greatest contribution and staying power was it's regex engine and syntax which persists.

I don't even like python, for what it's worth, but it's popular for more reasons than it just being "shiny and new" (to the extent that you can even say that about python these days).

I don't disagree with anything you've said either, in fact I've blogged about this at length: http://leejo.github.io/2017/12/17/tpc_and_the_end_of_languag...

My main issue is that "People still use Perl?" has essentially become a meme at this point. I'm relatively sure that any sufficiently commented on or upvoted thread on HN gets that statement in it somewhere.

Yes, Perl is still used. Extensively. People and companies just don't talk about it. That's the problem with Perl these days.

(Personally I think TAP and CPAN were Perl's greatest contributions, as I was never a heavy user of regexp).

> People and companies just don't talk about it.

Why not?

Last company used Perl but we didn't talk about it because it was all frozen. If anyone ever considered touching it for more than 2 hours, it was likely to get rewritten into Python/Powershell. Last perl thing I had touched, entire repo hadn't seen a commit for 4 years until mine.

> Why not?

I don't know. I could speculate:

  * The Perl they have is so low maintenance they don't think about it much
  * Or they're planning to rewrite it but haven't yet got around to it... after more than a decade?
  * They have nobody working on it that is vocal about it or active in the community/blogsphere/etc
  * The company policy is to not talk about it
  * Or talk about any tech they use - think: banks, large enterprise, fintech
  * Or they're successful enough they don't feel the need to talk about it
  * They're open source tools or distros that have a mass of other tech so Perl gets ignored even though its practically embedded - Linux distros, git, etc
  * The Perl is on the periphery, or not the core logic - test suites (memcached for example), used in build systems, pipelines, Make, oneliners, etc

There's an argument to be had that Perl's strong backwards compatibility has meant it has sat there working in the background for years (decades in some cases). And, as most of us know, when tech "just works" it doesn't get talked about.

I think that all makes sense. I would perhaps as an outside observer also lay the blame at Perl's feet - with Perl 6 the momentum seemed to crash completely over a decade or so.

I think the lack of discussion of perl is in part because from a bird's eye view, python and perl do exactly the same stuff in exactly the same way, but python has the mindshare. Because of perl's depth and flexibility, for the average developer team it can be really hard to manage.

There's a similar story around javascript - note how es6(?) introduced `"use strict"`. Old school javascript always struck me as a bit like crippled perl with really good vendor support.

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