hi, i was interested if perl is still relevant in this day and age. Perl has been on the decline for a very long time now. Perl 6 (now named 'raku) not being backwards compatible with perl 5 code made the already small perl community even smaller by splitting it in half. A good example is lisp with it’s thousands of different dialects.
Is it still worth using or is it bound to legacy software forever? Like cobol.
Perl hasn’t lost any of it’s qualities or relevance or usefulness.
It’s just, with these incompatible language upgrades, they are creating artificial barriers for starters and for occasional users. The outcome is that they are making it less popular, sadly.
Its qualities*
Which incompatible language upgrades? Are you talking about Perl 6?
That was never really an iteration of Perl, and it was renamed Raku some years back so is no longer named like it’s an iteration of Perl.
Perl continues as Perl 5 and honestly values compatibility extremely highly, probably more than many (most?) other languages. There have been a handful of breaking changes over the years (most notable for me was the hash key ordering thing) but those are usually security related rather than anything else.
I write Perl at work. Supporting an actively developed Perl based application.
It’s honestly not that bad as a language, the biggest downside is that the ecosystem of libraries around it are often abandoned or outdated. The language isn’t perfect and it needs a bit of discipline to avoid creating unreadable code, but honestly it’s not as bad as its reputation might have you believe.
It has quite a few tricks and unexpected bits of flexibility that make it quite a bit more expressive than other languages - you can really craft nice compact, elegant code with it if you want to.
These days I use other languages too (Python, Ruby, JS, etc) but none of them quite match Perl for expressiveness.
Oh also it’s great for oneliners. That expressiveness can be abused for brevity in some really interesting ways.
Do you work for booking.com? Only place I’ve seen that advertises the fact they run on a perl codebase
Nope. But I know a bunch of people that do or have, and have interviewed several (it’s a pretty small sector!)
Is Raku really used as much as perl? Splitting the community in half is quite the claim…
I still use Perl for most things – it’s my go-to language when I have to get something done quickly. And quickly doesn’t have to mean small one-liner scripts.
My biggest reason for using it is that mod_perl is still blazingly fast.
I know of at least one big online company that still has a staggering amount of perl in their stack for 2023 (IMO)
Its* thousands of different dialects.