[FillardMillmore]

I like Perl, but it's had a bit of an identity crisis since Perl 6. I believe late last year, they renamed it to Raku as a 'solution' to this identity crisis. I still think Perl can get the job done in a lot of different circumstances and, despite the fact that it's not really used as widely for web tooling as it was in the late '90s, it's still an invaluable scripting tool for sysadmins still willing to dip their toes in and learn it. As others have noted, the 'shiny new toy' effect has made Perl less attractive, but I think Perl has unfairly gotten a bad rap, especially in regards to opinions of how 'ugly' the language is - I tend to think it's more elegant than ugly. And of course, any programming language can be ugly - all depends on how clever the programmer in question wants to be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raku_(programming_language)

[rotterdamdev]

Perl came as a reaction to the Unix tooling that was awk regex and all that jazz. It was designed to replace those tools and it did a good job at that. Times have changed, however, and perl no longer fills a function. We have python now, which surpasses perl in functionality.

[b2gills]

What functionality does Python have that Perl doesn't?

I'm legitimately asking because I'm pretty sure there is almost no functionality in Python that isn't in Perl.

In fact of the features I've read about that changed between Python 2 and 3, all of them remind me of a change in Perl. Except Perl didn't break old code in the process.