Let's not forget that Perl 6 was announced because Perl 5 usage was already stagnating. Perl 6 was supposed to fix that problem. But it ended up making it worse.
> The backwards incompatibility of Perl 6 absolutely killed Perl.
I think the backwards incompatibility was a minor issue compared to how long it took for Perl 6 to be released. It was eighteen years from the announcement to the first (just barely) usable release. And for a lot of that time, I was hearing tech leads say things like "we don't want to start this project in Perl 5 if Perl 6 is just around the corner."
At some point, they changed the narrative from "Perl 6 is the next version of Perl" to "Perl 6 is a sister language to Perl" - but they should have renamed it at that point instead of waiting another 5 years.
It's worth remembering that the Perl 6 project was started because Perl usage was stagnating. But the project was so badly managed that it killed off both Perl 5 and Perl 6 (now renamed Raku).
> The whole thing was written in perl 4 style OO Perl
What does that mean? Perl's basic OO support (using blessed hash references) was introduced with Perl 5 in 1994. I have no idea how anyone would even attempt writing OO code in Perl 4.
> The ecosystem is also pretty much dead, it's not unusual to find bugs in packages where the issue tracker hasn't been responded to in 10 years, and the issue for the bug you're interested in has been languishing for literally years.
Yes. Very much this. Anecdotally, I'd estimate that, outside of the big, well-known modules, about 25% of the CPAN modules I try to use have bugs that render them unusable and unresponsive maintainers.
Speaking as a London-based freelancer specialising in Perl, I can tell you that the number of companies developing new systems in Perl is tiny (like, maybe, half a dozen).
Until four or five years ago, there was still plenty of maintenance work to be had, but even that has pretty much dried up now.
I'll qualify that by some observations re the Ruby job situation in London which seems quite steady. Rails jobs in London in Indeed, for example have hovered around the 250 mark for many years now whilst Ruby jobs advertised are still higher than Golang. I just received an email from a recruiter listing 21 Ruby roles so it's not quite Perl yet. I also notice a high percentage of "Who Is Hiring" roles here on HN feature Ruby/Rails so maybe Ruby's fate will be as a middle-tier language with adoption just below the big guns - Python, JS, Java, C# and PHP.
Yes, the trend of usage metrics don't look promising. It's basically only used for Rails and the heyday was 2010-2016. People are much more likely to reach for Django/Python or Javascript backends, especially with the ubiquity of React. Ruby jobs are going to generally be maintenance of older projects.
Will take awhile for Ruby to reach that state (if at all), 15 years at least I'd say. The reality is many companies are built on Ruby and rewrites are hard. Stripe, Shopify, Github, Gitlab and the list goes on. Perl never had this kind of traction afaik - yes many scripts were written on Perl but not many .com companies were based on it.
But I'm not arguing Ruby is well past it's peak - that is (sad, to me) fact because I happen to think it's a gorgeous language but it is what it is. I guess I'll have to get used to Python/Node or maybe switch to low level which is an old and perhaps unrealistic old dream of mine.
> Perl never had this kind of traction afaik - yes many scripts were written on Perl but not many .com companies were based on it.
Were you around for the first (pre-2000) dotcom boom? From where I was sitting (freelancing in London) it sometimes seemed that all of the first wave of dotcom companies were writing their apps in Perl.
In fact, I've often thought that a lot of Perl's current bad reputation stems from this generation's CTOs and dev managers being people who suffered writing those Perl web apps at a time when no-one knew how any of this stuff was supposed to work and careful design went out the window in the rush to get things to market before the bubble burst.
I think Perl lost to Ruby because of Rails. Whilst Perl had a couple of web frameworks - Catalyst, Mojolicious and Dancer - they never gained anywhere near the traction of Rails. I think this was because Perl's early success in the 90s was based on CGI.pm, not frameworks. Catalyst gained a little adoption at a few big companies but it was hobbled by dependence on mod_perl which had a much riskier memory mode for hosting companies than mod_php. Perl was also a bit late shedding its mod_perl legacy by which time Ruby had Rack and Python had WSGI. Despite the brilliant work of Miyagawa it was game over by the time PSGI and Plack appeared.
> I think this was because Perl's early success in the 90s was based on CGI.pm, not frameworks.
Exactly, the second wave of dotcom software was largely written using frameworks that built on the mistakes we'd been making in the first wave.
And because, so many programmers had memories of horrible experiences trying to beat Perl/CGI applications into submission, it was probably too late for Perl even then - although a large number of excellent Perl tools (Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Template Toolkit, Moose, PSGI to name just a few) were emerging at about the same time as Ruby on Rails or Django.
Yeah, A lot of those early web apps were total spaghetti garbage hardcoded to a table layout, so if they survived most of them were rewritten from scratch. Of course perl programmers' tricky tendencies didn't help, but also say ASP and ColdFusion etc have similar reputation issues.
Zoopla. It's been a couple of years I left, but I believe they still use Perl for the core business logic. There are wrappers/docker images built on top of them, but Perl is doing all the heavy lifting AFAIK.
IME, big older companies have Perl code chugging along, but not very visible. Part of this is also because there's the perception that it is hard to attract developers if the company mentions Perl any where in the job description.
Agreed. It's VHS trumping Betamax all over again. Few things irk me more than Pythonistas crowing over their world dominance but if you look at the top 3 languages - Python, JS & Java - it's clear that language design counts for nothing.
I think it's largely because of Ruby's deep association with Rails. This is nothing against Rails, per se, but so many people only think of Ruby in association with it that they just never reach for it in other contexts. Personally, I think Ruby is a great utility scripting language, really good for the sort of small projects that many people would probably have used Perl for two decades ago.
(Having said that, I suspect that the Ruby community's love of "first, install a Ruby version manager" does it no favors when it comes to adoption for these sorts of small projects, although the same is arguably true of Python.)
I'm semi-retired. I have a part-time contract maintaining a system I worked on a few years ago and I pick up other bits of freelance work from time to time.
And I've been prototyping a few project ideas (in Perl) to see if any of them could be a sustainable source of passive income. Of course, if any of them grow to the extent that they need a development team, I'll need to rewrite them in a more sustainable language.
Historically, it was the Perl web site for a long time. It was registered by Tom Christiansen in 1994 and soon afterwards, he let O'Reilly run it - and they used it to post useful Perl news and articles for a long time.
But O'Reilly's interest in Perl waned and it sat, moribund, for several years (which probably explains its lack of Googlejuice).
A few years ago, the Perl community approached Tom and he let them take over running it. The team behind the PerlTricks web site ported over all the old articles and had been posting new ones. It had become a pretty useful resource again.
So, yes, it would be a shame to lose it. But from what brian has posted elsewhere on this thread, that seems unlikely to happen.
