Hello Sébastien! I see you're a Perl enthusiast and even a member of the Perl Weekly editorial team. And all your geese are swans, of course. Indeed, I haven't an intention to derogate from the value of the tech you're best with. But let's make sense of it. When we speak about Perl, we mean Perl 5, which initial release was in 1994. Perl 6 is in the permanent "Under construction" stage since 2000, but in 2019 the name was changed to Raku, so, actually, it is not Perl. And this fact reminds something. What's to the fifth version, it's by no means mainstream. Currently, Perl is the 17th most popular based on TIOBI Index with ~1%. Of course, there is still much working software based on Perl. And such enthusiasts like you are in high demand thanks to employee scarcity.
But please tell me how many juniors in your community? I bet there is no sign of people with less than 10 years of Perl experience in your community, not by a long shot, right? At Glassdoor, I've found just a couple of Perl-focused positions among much more where Perl was just mentioned. Almost all of them include Perl as a part of requirements kinda "Experience with at least one scripting language (Python, PHP, Perl,…)", so, Perl is just an extra here. No offense, but nowadays Perl-based software is highly likely obsolete, and most often a complete rewrite of it using something more popular and up to time is the best idea.
I'm sorry but you just lost your bet. I have no more than four years of Perl experience and I'm a member of this community.
Perl 5 release date does not matter, because for many years it was locked to major version number 5 due to Perl 6 experiment. With all the new features and all the excellent community modules, it is a completely different language than even perl 5.8, not to mention 5.0.
I would disagree with this. One of the things the Perl team does, is prevent obsolescence. There are still updates to Perl 5, it's still moving forwards, it's still keeping old software supported. I think it's different when a team decides that a language will no longer receive updates etc (eg Python 2, what happens if there's a security flaw found). We still code new things in it. We know other large sites that use Perl extensively.
Sure, there are much more flavours of the month out there, but like some other languages, Perl has stood the test of time. There are no surprises with it, no sudden breakages. I do agree about less specific Perl programmers out there, and sure, not many new teams would choose Perl as a language to start a project with (unless a good familiarity with Perl already).
To clarify: I am not a member of the Perl Weekly editorial team.
The fact the language is unpopular doesn't mean it is not suitable for most of the imaginable tasks. And it's oldness make it very stable. Also the unpopular aspect push companies to hide their own use of this language (they wouldn't like to scare people). For example, most of Unix like systems requires Perl for proper functioning.
There are all kind of trendy technologies that get much more appeal, but this one is still there after 25+ years.
I think judging anything by popularity is biased and in this way, TIOBE is rather meaningless.
In the Perl community I remember of a very good storie about "rewriting from scratch" an application that was functionning. Two years later, and an explosing budget, the rewriting project is cancelled because the initial Perl app was faster. Yes, faster! Perl 😂
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Hello Sébastien! I see you're a Perl enthusiast and even a member of the Perl Weekly editorial team. And all your geese are swans, of course. Indeed, I haven't an intention to derogate from the value of the tech you're best with. But let's make sense of it. When we speak about Perl, we mean Perl 5, which initial release was in 1994. Perl 6 is in the permanent "Under construction" stage since 2000, but in 2019 the name was changed to Raku, so, actually, it is not Perl. And this fact reminds something. What's to the fifth version, it's by no means mainstream. Currently, Perl is the 17th most popular based on TIOBI Index with ~1%. Of course, there is still much working software based on Perl. And such enthusiasts like you are in high demand thanks to employee scarcity.
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But please tell me how many juniors in your community? I bet there is no sign of people with less than 10 years of Perl experience in your community, not by a long shot, right? At Glassdoor, I've found just a couple of Perl-focused positions among much more where Perl was just mentioned. Almost all of them include Perl as a part of requirements kinda "Experience with at least one scripting language (Python, PHP, Perl,…)", so, Perl is just an extra here. No offense, but nowadays Perl-based software is highly likely obsolete, and most often a complete rewrite of it using something more popular and up to time is the best idea.
BTW I have only < 4 years of professional Perl experience.
I'm sorry but you just lost your bet. I have no more than four years of Perl experience and I'm a member of this community.
Perl 5 release date does not matter, because for many years it was locked to major version number 5 due to Perl 6 experiment. With all the new features and all the excellent community modules, it is a completely different language than even perl 5.8, not to mention 5.0.
I would disagree with this. One of the things the Perl team does, is prevent obsolescence. There are still updates to Perl 5, it's still moving forwards, it's still keeping old software supported. I think it's different when a team decides that a language will no longer receive updates etc (eg Python 2, what happens if there's a security flaw found). We still code new things in it. We know other large sites that use Perl extensively.
Sure, there are much more flavours of the month out there, but like some other languages, Perl has stood the test of time. There are no surprises with it, no sudden breakages. I do agree about less specific Perl programmers out there, and sure, not many new teams would choose Perl as a language to start a project with (unless a good familiarity with Perl already).
To clarify: I am not a member of the Perl Weekly editorial team.
The fact the language is unpopular doesn't mean it is not suitable for most of the imaginable tasks. And it's oldness make it very stable. Also the unpopular aspect push companies to hide their own use of this language (they wouldn't like to scare people). For example, most of Unix like systems requires Perl for proper functioning.
There are all kind of trendy technologies that get much more appeal, but this one is still there after 25+ years.
I think judging anything by popularity is biased and in this way, TIOBE is rather meaningless.
In the Perl community I remember of a very good storie about "rewriting from scratch" an application that was functionning. Two years later, and an explosing budget, the rewriting project is cancelled because the initial Perl app was faster. Yes, faster! Perl 😂