I love Perl. I first used it in 1994, around the time the early versions of Perl 5 were released. It’s hard to overstate what a breath of fresh air it was compa

I love Perl. I first used it in 1994, around the time the early versions of Perl 5 were released. It’s hard to overstate what a breath of fresh air it was compared to the incumbent languages at the time, which were either very low-level (mainly C, and increasingly C++, at least in the Unix world) or else brittle and limited (various flavours of shell script, sed, awk). Perl was a joy to use. Things that would have needed dozens of bug-prone lines of C could be done in just a few characters. Regular expressions and associative arrays were first-class language features! And, with the advent of Perl 5, there was enough scope for structuring code in a modular way that it wasn’t insane to write pretty large and serious programs. The culture was delightful too. In those days it was centred on Usenet and mailing lists, and the general attitude was freewheeling and fun. When the first user group was set up in London, where I was living by then, I signed up immediately. That’s still the most fun I’ve ever had hanging out with programmers, and Perl was the glue that bound us together. At some point I joined the developers’ mailing list (perl5-porters), just to see what they were up to. After a while I started to contribute: bug fixes at first, and later language features. That was fun. So, Perl has been a big part of my programming life. But I haven’t really used it in anger for about 15 years. I still write Perl one-liners on the command line for ad hoc data processing, and actually I think Perl is still the best available tool for that, although younger coders tend not to be familiar with it any more. But as for writing real programs? The world has moved on. There are newer languages that have taken the good ideas from Perl, but without so many confusing idiosyncrasies. Perl 6 is another story, one that I didn’t have much part in. It’s a fun bundle of ideas, and maybe some of those ideas will spread and be useful elsewhere, but I doubt it will ever catch on itself. I’ll always love Perl, but I doubt I’ll ever write another serious program in it – except maybe out of nostalgia.