[_swfb]

I actually still have the email.

Here's what I sent:

    Hello! 

    I don't have a lot to say to you, but I just wanted to say that about a month ago, I started the transition away from Google, and the most obvious thing to switch was search.  

    DuckDuckGo has improved substantially since the last time I used it (around 2012), and it's to a point where the results are comparable, and sometimes even better than Google, so changing was pretty seamless. Now the only Google-thing I need to remove from my life is YouTube. 

    As a somewhat technical person, I was curious about one thing; I saw that the primary language for DuckDuckGo is Perl.  Without making any judgement here, was there a particular reason for that choice?  Also, are you planning to move to Perl 6? 

    Anyway, I appreciate you reading my email.  DuckDuckGo is a great service, and I hope you guys keep up the good work!

    -Thomas Gebert. 

Here was his response:

    Yes, though, the primary language is Perl. It was out of convenience and interest since that was my primary language when I started the project. There was/are a lot of libraries useful for text processing / web crawling. Now Python and other libraries have been similarly built up.

[SushiHippie]

Amazing, thanks for sharing!

What year was this? (I'm Curious, as you mentioned 2012 was the last year you used at the time of the E-Mail)

[_swfb]

It's actually more recent than I thought, looks like it was 2018. I would have sworn it was earlier but I can see the "sent" timestamp on ProtonMail.

[SushiHippie]

2018 is still a long time ago, so that's totally understandable haha

Thank you!

[creer]

Always makes me laugh when I read things like "2018 is still a long time ago" (no offense or downvote). But also the very thing that perl fought against. Your programming is not going to break for a long time (much longer than 6 years) because there is no reason for language features to change that quickly - certainly compsci theory does not change anywhere that fast.

It takes time to build very large projects like a large, layered programming language, and it should be normal to take many years to learn all the features of something like perl or raku. Because there should be no reason to do it all at once rather than be productive in the meantime.

So anyway, 6 years should not be much in the career of a programming language.