Pinderkent

It's not the end for Perl. It hasn't died. We won't see that happen for some time, if ever. But lately, it sure has lost its way. Andrew Binstock recently pointed this out in his article about Perl. Although it is very difficult to measure or quantify a programming language's popularity, we can get an overall sense of the "buzz" surrounding it.

Perl used to have that community "buzz". About 10 or 12 years ago, when somebody brought up Perl in a newsgroup or mailing list discussion, there was genuine excitement about what it had to offer. Mainly, that was rapid development, CPAN, powerful regular expressions, and the ability to write CGI scripts, all with little expense. We had needs, and Perl did a fantastic job of meeting them.

Times have changed. We still need to be able to develop software rapidly and with as little cost as possible. But we now have to make better use of our systems with multicore CPUs. Languages like Erlang often do this better than Perl does. Also, we need languages that allow for applications to be more easily maintained. For most sizeable, real-world development projects, Perl code can quickly become a maintenance headache.

Furthermore, the main benefits of Perl are now offered by most other mainstream languages. Python and Ruby offer very good regex support, a suitably large library, support for rapid development, a high degree of portability, and a low cost. Python, for instance, often encourages the development of more maintainable programs than Perl does.

There's very little that'll draw people specifically towards Perl. Recently, I've seen it used only because that's what the developers were most familiar with, or in numerous businesses, it's what they're stuck maintaining. Few people these days seem to choose Perl because it offers something they just can't get elsewhere.

Andrew makes some good observations in his post. One we really need to consider is how, for example, the Python community has gone out of its way to create several usable and actively-developed implementations of the language. We have the CPython implementation. There's IronPython for .NET. There's also Jython for Java. And we can't forget Stackless Python.

We just don't see that sort of activity in the Perl community. Sure, there is Rakudo. And there is also the now-stagnant Pugs implementation. But neither is really suitable for production use. Meanwhile, the different Python implementations are used successfully by many different people and companies. The Python implementations have momentum; Perl does not.

I read a number of blogs, mailing lists, newsgroups, and online forums dealing with Perl. Likewise, I talk often with people in industry who make use of Perl on a daily basis. And one thing I've noticed is that there's little excitement to be found. I think the extraordinarily long time it has taken to get anything useful in terms of Perl 6 has been extremely harmful to the Perl community. To really see a programming language prosper, it needs that raw community excitement. Python and Ruby currently have this excitement. Erlang and Haskell have it, too. Even the Common Lisp community seems more up-beat than the Perl community.

It's far too early to label Perl as "dead", or even "dying". Perl will be with us for ages. But we shouldn't deceive ourselves into thinking that it still has the same momentum that it used to, or has momentum comparable to what we see in the Python, Erlang, Ruby and Lisp communities. The action we see within the Perl community pales these days compared to what is happening in the other communities.