[rocgf]

I worked at Booking.com for a while, though never in Perl directly.

Take this with the grain of salt of any personal anecdote on the Internet, but I can definitely say that Perl is not loved there. Most people hated it deeply, some of them were like "it's not horrible...".

They are now allowing Java as well for the newer project, and they will have Java and Perl as 'blessed' languages moving forward. I don't really believe that they are doubling down on Perl in any sense of the word, they're just doing what any other company with a huge amount of code written in a dying language would.