Perl in 2025 🐪
In 2025, I unexpectedly find myself enjoying Perl again — after years of Ruby and Go.
It sounds strange, but Perl hasn’t aged the way many people think. It’s not trendy, elegant, or fashionable — and yet, for certain kinds of work, it feels perfect.
Don’t Learn Perl. Learn UNIX.
Should you learn Perl in 2025?
Honestly — no. At least, not directly.
Start with UNIX system programming:
- Work in the shell.
- Understand file descriptors and streams.
- Learn how processes are born, end, and communicate.
- Get comfortable with Bash and other UNIX tools.
Once you understand these things, Perl becomes automatic.
You don’t “study” Perl — you realize you already understand it.
Perl Looks Messy — Until You See the Process
Here’s the key insight:
If you look at Perl from a syntax perspective, it looks messy.
But if you look at it through the lens of UNIX processes and streams, it suddenly becomes crystal clear and intuitive.
Perl isn’t designed like Python or Go, where you build large structures full of imports, frameworks, and abstractions.
A Perl script is simply a process:
- born by the OS,
- with three streams (STDIN, STDOUT, STDERR),
- communicating with other processes,
- manipulating files, signals, and descriptors.
When you see programs this way, Perl’s “cryptic” operators and shortcuts stop looking weird — they become beautifully compressed UNIX primitives.
Perl Is a Tool, Not a System
Modern languages — Python, Ruby, Go — often push you toward designing systems.
Perl isn’t like that.
Perl is a sharp tool for solving tasks quickly:
- Renaming hundreds of files? One-liner.
- Parsing gigabytes of logs? Two-liner.
- Automating a messy workflow? Done before lunch.
You don’t worry about architecture, imports, or frameworks.
You just write the code, run the process, and move on.
Perl feels less like a language and more like an extension of your UNIX shell.
Why Perl Lost Popularity
Perl didn’t die — it simply stepped aside. The web changed.
In the early days, the web was simple: HTML pages, images, and tables.
Perl thrived because it could glue things together effortlessly.
But today’s web apps are massive, layered systems with complex UIs, APIs, and distributed backends.
Perl was never designed for this — so it faded from the spotlight.
Why Perl Will Never Fade Away
Perl still matters because it’s tied to UNIX itself.
- Its syntax mirrors UNIX primitives directly.
- It doesn’t hide processes and streams behind abstractions.
- It becomes intuitive only after you understand the OS.
For sysadmins, DevOps engineers, and anyone who works close to the system, Perl remains reliable, concise, and insanely useful.
Perl doesn’t chase trends.
It doesn’t ship breaking changes every six months.
It’s like a ballpoint pen and a squared notebook: simple, stable, always ready when you need it.
Final Thought
Perl developers don’t see programs as abstract algorithms or piles of imports.
They see them as processes — living entities with streams, signals, and descriptors, talking to other processes in a UNIX world.
When you shift to this perspective, Perl syntax suddenly becomes obvious.
It’s not cryptic anymore — it’s just UNIX in shorthand.
Perl isn’t a language you learn.
It’s a language you grow into.
And once you do, it feels like home. 🐪
Top comments (2)
Thank you – you are right to describe Perl in such visceral terms as 'sharp', 'reliable', 'insanely useful'. This dynamic language (pun intended) is completely appropriate for such an enormously capable and incisive technology.
Perl is indeed phenomenally capable, like no other language, for the sort of tricky data munging you describe.
I just don't understand why you think Perl "wasn't designed for massive, layered [complex] systems". I've spent most of my career doing exactly that.
Perl's uniquely well-thought-out design principles, extensive core functionality and expressive power, thanks to founder Larry Wall's polymathic understanding linguistics and computation and the work of thousands of contributors, lets it excel not just at hardcore scripting but also high-performance modern web development (e.g.
Mojolicious,Dancer2,PSGI/Plack); compiler construction (Parse::RecDescent); unbeatable database access (DBI/DBD::*/DBIx::Class); scientific computing (Perl Data Language (PDL) – more mature, faster and more capable than NumPy); full-fat CLI apps (ncurses); file handling (File::*in the core and CPAN,Path::Tiny); and there's a famously opulent choice of OOP libraries supplementing both the original (tbh basic, but functional) core OOP and now the brand-new coreCorclass system, with powerful, 'postmodern'Moosestill the clear favourite, forming the basis for complex OO backend frameworks and applications of any kind.And let's not forget music production (
MIDI::*,Music::*); data munging (CSV::*, YAML (born in the Perl ecosystem),JSONandXML::*); visual programming (Perl/Tk,wxPerl); games programming (SDL); caching (Redis,CHI) and much, much more.Perl's Popeye-like strength as a general purpose programming language is particularly evident in its world-beating, pioneering yet still cutting-edge wealth of libraries for creating tests for almost any programming need. Thank you,
TAP(Test Anything Protocol),Test::Simple,Test::More,Test::Most,Test::Builderand now the neweryathandTest2::*library system, supplemented by hundreds of specialised testing distributions.JavaScript is beloved of many. But next to Perl, it just seems clunky. (Compare pattern matching in JS and Perl, for instance.) C# looks unnecessarily complicated, tiresome and verbose.
Perl's regular expression capabilities and exceptional support for Unicode beat every other language hands down (apart from Raku, its 'younger sister' originally called Perl 6).
Thank you for highlighting some of Perl's many strengths – but there are far more!
Find anything you need at MetaCPAN.
Thank you a lot for the kind and warm response.
My intention in this article was:
And the last one, I did not know yet that Perl 5.12 and Perl 5.42 are “different languages.” Perl does not change major version number, keeps backward compatibility, but still grows as other languages of the same class. I got that only after publishing this article in r/perl at Reddit.