[roryrjb]

There's so much negativity in this thread. I think that a big part of Perl's decline is exactly because of people's attitudes. I don't actually write any Perl now, but to me it's a beautiful language, I always enjoy working in it. You can abuse it in the wrong way like every other language. If I was to suggest using it in the day job there would be uproar probably. But just because I like Perl doesn't mean I want to write everything in it, use the best tool for the job and sometimes the best tool is Perl.

[freedomben]

Yes, thank you. Perl was an absolute earth-shaker back in it's day. Even still it's a fantastic language for string manipulation. Much of Ruby's beauty, expressability, and powerful string processing is thanks to inspiration from Perl. It's disappointing to see people crapping on such a venerable language.

[cheeze]

Prel is great and has an important role, even today.

That being said, I'm a professional dev and we own a decent amount of perl. That codebase is by far the most difficult to work in out of anything we own. New hires have trouble with it (nobody learns perl these days). Lots of it is next to unreadable.

I agree that like any other language, perl can be written well and can be written poorly. That being said, perl makes it _really_ easy to write something poorly, in contrast to something like python which is a bit more rigid and tries to have one right way to do things.

I still use perl pretty extensively for little one liners, but at this point we are actively trying to get rid of as much perl that we own as possible. We find that rarely writing anything longer than 10 lines should be done in perl, if only from a readability and maintainability standpoint.

I love perl. It was THE game changer for many many years. But perl is falling out of fashion quick.

I'd have no problem working in the language with some very rigid guidelines and a bunch of experts.

But the reality is that nobody is hiring perl experts, perl experts are becoming more and more scarce, and most new hires have a bit of experience with py or rb. I dont dislike perl, I'd just argue it's almost always the wrong thing tool for the job these days.

In a previous life I worked at a large E commerce company. You've likely ordered from them. Pretty much everything ran on perl/perl Mason for over a decade. At that time perl was the cool new thing that everyone wanted to pick up. Now (or when I left a few years back), most of that code represented a liability if it needed to be changed.

IMO this is just the cycle of a programming language.

I remember reading Spolsky articles where he talks about VB6 like it's some shiny new amazing scripting language, akin to python 10 or so years ago. But alas, time moves on and so do most programmers.

[anomalizer]

I've gone from finding perl an absolute joy to program in circa 2005 to now (2019) where I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole. The sentiment seems pretty natural and common.