[ddellacosta]

I can't read this article due to the paywall, but here's my lukewarm take based on the title at least: "nobody" codes in Perl any more because the language lost a lot of mindshare in the transition from Perl 5 to Perl 6, a.k.a. Raku. And regardless it's always been a fairly idiosyncratic language in a lot of ways. Stuff like Ruby (which inherits DNA from Perl along with Lisp and Smalltalk), PHP (also takes some notes from Perl, perhaps more superficially), and Python ate a lot of its lunch.

It was the first language I wrote professionally and I always thought it was a lot of fun, but if I want to be humbled these days I reach for Haskell (like a lot of the Perl community it sounds like...).

EDIT: okay I read the article, thanks to welpo for the archive link. Yeah this is kind of a nostalgic piece so I think my original comment is still relevant. I do like Perl still, I will always have a spot in my heart for it. I appreciate especially how seriously Larry Wall tried to think about approaching things vis-a-vis linguistics even if I don't necessarily think that's the best approach for a language used by an engineering team these days.

I hope it sticks around in any case. It is truly unique.

[stouset]

I agree it was a combination of Raku and Ruby. As far as I'm concerned, Ruby deprecates Perl 5. It fills the same niche while avoiding a lot of the absolutely crazier parts of Perl (no shade; Perl was designed in a far different time and place). If you know Ruby, there is essentially zero reason to learn Perl. I have fond memories of the language, it was the first one I wrote professionally, but never again.

Raku being in such an indeterminate state for so long was an eternity for it to lose mindshare to Ruby.

[ddellacosta]

> If you know Ruby, there is essentially zero reason to learn Perl.

I don't think I ever thought about it but I think I have implicitly taken this to heart since I last was using Perl seriously. Almost every engineering org I've worked for in the last decade has had Ruby as a part of its stack for e.g. scripting or lambdas and it's what I reach for when I need to script something. And I've done Rails work in a few orgs too, which has few parallels in its niche even without considering Perl.

Although I suspect for most people Python is where they land if we're just talking about scripting or hacking something together...or anything (I hate it but it is what it is lol).

[citrin_ru]

> If you know Ruby, there is essentially zero reason to learn Perl

When I still used Perl (10y ago) Ruby was notably slower on many tasks. Ruby probably the slowest among popular script languages.

[stouset]

Bordering on zero percent of projects too performance sensitive to be written in Ruby should be written in Perl instead.

[calmbonsai]

I used Perl extensively for small-network (~25 boxen) sysadmin and local/personal tooling, but never in cluster/multi-node deployed production. It gave too much freedom for expression making it difficult to "team-scale".

I stopped using it circa 2000 for no real reason other than Python was easier for teams to adopt and common modules became well-maintained enough where CPAN was no longer a competitive advantage. It also helped that Guido lived and worked a few minutes north in Reston, VA back then.

That said, I still "think" in Perl regex to this very day. ;)

[ddellacosta]

> That said, I still "think" in Perl regex to this very day. ;)

Yeah good point, if there's one thing from Perl that will live far longer than the language itself it's PCREs. I can't thank my experience with the language enough for my facility in crafting regexps.

[xarope]

Agreed, Perl introduced me to REGEX and hashes. To this day, whenever I do any work with data, I tend to think in terms of REGEX first rather than convoluted string manipulation.

[graemep]

Like many paywalls it goes away if you turn off JS.