[lp4v4n]

I started working in the 10's and I have never met a single developer who actively works with Perl.

Sometimes I wonder whether Perl left a huge code base behind, like COBOL did, but I suspect it didn't, mostly due to the fact that Perl is a dynamically typed language used mainly for web development and sysadmin scripting.

Perl unlike Java, which had no serious alternative in its niche, unfortunately has an uncertain future in my opinion. Not that Perl is going to disappear suddenly like coffee script, but as the old timers retire or pass away in the next decades, I can certainly see the language slowly "evaporating".

[doublerabbit]

Perl is being migrated to Python. Two of the big banks I know have been running LLM tooling to migrate from. My last job was for a fortune 10 bank.

I personally learnt it at the age of 17 as the homemade switchboard for MSN Messenger bots were coded in it.

I'm 36 now and still not letting go. Something about the syntax pleases my brain. I am currently learning Erlang.

[markoman]

Were these (bank) applications focused on text-processing or web applications? If they were web applications, I assume they weren't CGIs...

[doublerabbit]

For what I can expand upon, not web applications per-se. They displayed management pages accessible via browser for different departments to manage, resource management, statistics, estimated costs and calculations.

The main usage were on back office tooling such as reporting back job queues, status of specific jobs, load balancing and the likes.

[librasteve]

this

[ei8ths]

I work in Perl daily, in k12 as a sys admin / network engineer. I have it do all my automation, some internal web apps.

I started on Java, PHP, C++ and during my php years i discovered Perl because we needed it at work for systems. I just love it.

[qingcharles]

It was big in the mid-90s for writing web apps, IIRC. There weren't many options in the early days. I was writing web apps in pure C, which wasn't really ideal.