What Killed Perl?

As a very long-time Perl developer and FOSS contributor, I think this blog post is incorrect about whether Perl 6/Raku was a factor in Perl's decline. I think Perl 6/Raku did a few things that hurt Perl 5:

1. It pulled away folks who would otherwise have spent time improving Perl 5 (either the core or via modules).

2. It discouraged significant changes to the Perl 5 language, since many people figured that it wasn't worth it with Perl 6 just around the corner.

3. It confused CTO/VP Eng types, some of whom thought that they shouldn't invest in Perl 5, since Perl 6 was coming soon. I've heard multiple people in the Perl community discuss hearing this directly from execs.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

Also, even if Perl 6 had never happened the way it did and instead we'd just had smaller evolutions of the language in major versions, I think usage would still have shrunk over time.

A lot of people just dislike Perl's weird syntax and behavior. Many of those people were in a position to teach undergrads, and they chose to use Python and Java.

And other languages have improved a lot or been created in the past 20+ years. Java has gotten way better, as has Python. JavaScript went from "terribly browser-only language" to "much less terrible run anywhere language" with a huge ecosystem. And Go came along and provided an aggressively mediocre but very usable strongly typed language with super-fast builds and easy deploys.

Edit: Also PHP was a huge factor in displacing Perl for the quick and dirty web app on hosted services. It was super easy to deploy and ran way faster than Perl without mod_perl. Using mod_perl generally wasn't possible on shared hosting, which was very common back in the days before everyone got their own VM.

All of those things would still have eaten some of Perl's lunch.

Python and Ruby killed Perl.

Before Perl, there was no scripting language that could do systems tasks except maybe shell and tcl, but that's shell is an extremely unpleasant programming experience and the performance is horrid, and tcl's string-based nature is just too weird.

Perl gives you something more like a real programming language and can do shell-like tasks and systems tasks very nicely. Compared to what came before, it is amazing.

But then Ruby and Python came along and checked the "real programming language" box even more firmly than Perl while retaining the shell/systems angle. Ruby and Python were better than Perl along exactly the same axis as the one on which Perl was better than Tcl and shell.

Already in the very early millennium, jokes like “Perl is an explosion in an ASCII factory” were going around the computer-nerd community, while several publishers were putting out affordable and fun and engaging books to learn Python. No surprise that Perl quickly declined in popularity for scripting. It has been amusing to watch the continual waves of reawakened interest in awk, while Perl seems to remain perennially marginalized now.

It's been discussed before, but Python just seemed more straightforward to a lot of people. It had a built-in object oriented model as well when that was the rage instead of the weak default one and dozen modules on CPAN to do object oriented programming. There was generally one way to do something and that was easier to learn than TIMTOWTDI.

I learned and used Perl professionally from around 2005-2015 and experienced first-hand the ossification, fear of change, and lack of innovation in Perl 5 development. It seems all the talent and effort started being wasted on making Perl 6 the bestest, most elegant, most useful programming language in the world. Just seeing the neglect of Perl 5 kept me from ever considering Perl 6 and motivated me to move to other languages.

Perl is powerful, expressive, and cryptic. Its popularity faded during a time when the popular trend of programming languages was towards simplicity and legibility. C++ gave way to Java and C#.

Also, Perl's strength was text processing in a world where data was moving out of simple columnar text formats and into databases, xml, json, and other formats better represented by object models than lines of text.

I think it is due to the fact that Perl has some confusing bits like those variable prefixes ($@%), the lack of function arguments (I know that this has changed recently), not really great error handling, etc and so people started using languages which seemed easier to use like Python.

I still use perl. It's my go to for string parsing (think pipe log file, do something with it and send it to stdout). It's also my go to for anything that I still want to work in 10 years.

It was never about Perl, it was the plethora of alternatives.

Python evolved, PHP had 1000 times more "how to get started" articles, Node happened. And LAMP became the default for noobs.

Personally, back when Perl 6 was harmless vaporware, I never found a place for Perl 5.

For moderately advanced text processing with regular expressions, supposedly its strong point, it was far less elegant and concise than AWK at the low end and far less readable and less batteries-included than Python for more complex tasks involving some integration.

For dynamic web pages, another of the main uses of Perl, PHP was purposefully designed and (while not really good) practical and user-friendly, with plenty of other obviously more robust and serious options (Ruby, Java, later Python, etc.) for more enterprise projects.

As someone that was already working during the dotcom wave, Perl is a tool I would still reach for, given the problem I might trying to sort out, if on an UNIX like platform.

> Binary package managers that chase down dependencies on their own weren’t a thing until the early 2000s, I think?

UNIX package managers started to be made available during the 1990's.

About a dozen years ago, I noticed that the young all seemed to know Python, and did not seem to know Perl. Given that they would be maintaining such code as I wrote and was worth keeping around, I moved to writing in Python. Now when I write Perl, I do silly things like forget semicolons.

Perl can be very well written. I deeply regret not encountering Perl Best Practices when it came out.