[kamaal]

>>You can count number of Perl scripts out there and conclude that Perl is still the most popular scripting/devops tool in the world

Perl is still heavily used. I wrote more than 2K lines just last week, lots of it is throwaway. But hey not many languages make it easy for you to write thousands of lines of throwaway code in hours.

It's still the most useful language in the backend/unix world. This comes from me, who actually writes lots of Python code. But I wouldn't use Python where I use Perl. It would just make me slow and it wouldn't get the job done just as well as Perl.

It's not used as frequently for web dev, or other places where Java is used. But it's very good at what it does. Glue language for the Unix world.

[jjav]

> Perl is still heavily used. I wrote more than 2K lines just last week, lots of it is throwaway.

Agreed. For any one-off (or occasional) task that in any way involves juggling text (which in Unix CLI world is nearly all of it), perl is still the fastest way to get done.

Back in '92 (roughly when I started using perl), its regex support was revolutionary. Today, all languages have decent string handling and regex support. And yet, none is quite so naturally well integrated as in perl. So here 30 years later, if I need to pick apart and recombine text, give me perl.

[AzzieElbab]

would you consider those 2k perl loc legacy/maintenance work or something new?

[kamaal]

Why would it be called legacy, I wrote that just last week. This is active development.

Besides merely being an old technology doesn't mean legacy. SQL is fairly old.

[AzzieElbab]

I wrote a bunch of scala code last week to fix problems in a service that we are actively working to replace. I consider this a "legacy" work, nothing to do with technology used