[chaostheory]

That doesn’t look like the general trend even in the early 2000s. Perl projects tend to be the maintenance of old systems instead of the development of new ones. New blood is pooling around JS/TS and Python. At best Perl’s popularity has stagnated.

[perigrin]

Most of it's developers and advocates have moved on to other more popular languages is arguably true (in addition to JS/TS I see a lot of Perl devs moving to Go). I know I personally do very little Perl despite working on a team where a significant portion of the work is done in Perl that is less than 2 years old.

But that's not what you claimed, you claimed the developers and advocates were mostly retiring. And that simply doesn't appear to be true ... yet. Give it 10-20 years and I'll expect it to be very true.

I'd also say that Perl's popularity is effectively gone in the general use of the term. While some new development is actually being done in Perl, IME the only people choosing it are already Perl advocates.

[chaostheory]

> But that's not what you claimed, you claimed the developers and advocates were mostly retiring.

I can make multiple claims; they are not exclusive. Making a new claim doesn't necessarily make my previous one less true. My main point is Perl is like Cobol now. It'll probably be around long after we're both gone, but there's no more growth.

> I'd also say that Perl's popularity is effectively gone in the general use of the term. While some new development is actually being done in Perl, IME the only people choosing it are already Perl advocates.

it doesn't sound like we disagree.