5 ms·

I’m curious, is anyone doing active development with Perl? All the Perl I’ve seen has been in legacy systems.

claydavisss 6y ago
There are "real" companies using Perl presently...Booking and DuckDuckGo and others. Looking at Redmonk, Tiobe, other surveys...Perl isn't at the top of the heap by any measure but it also stubbornly refuses to die. I write Perl every day and frankly don't care if people think it is "dead", and even I am surprised at how prominent it figures in language surveys, still. Most of the key libraries I use are updated regularly. Perl itself is under active development with regular releases.
1996 6y ago
I do. Ideal for deploying on light (edge) servers.
hpcjoe 6y ago
Yes. Quite a few tools and products at $dayjob are Perl with active development, multiple large scale revenue numbers attached to them. I use perl daily in my work on supercomputers and hpc systems. My code helps configure and control them. It helps simplify users work. No. Perl is not dead by any measure.
sigzero 6y ago
I use it every day for sysadmin stuff.
redis_mlc 6y ago
Perl is still probably the best scripting language overall from the standpoint of forward references and type-checking. Whenever you see some Java or C programmer saying they can't accept the lack of type-checking in scripting languages, they're almost never talking about Perl. Also, Perl has the most powerful web framework, Mojolicious.
bachmeier 6y ago
I think it's very widely used for its original purpose, which is a shell replacement. When I need a short script, particularly for text processing, I'll usually reach for Perl now that the Perl 5/Perl 6 thing has been resolved. Just look at the activity on CPAN: https://metacpan.org/recent https://metacpan.org/recent There are two heavily developed/used web frameworks for Perl: https://mojolicious.org/ https://mojolicious.org/ and http://perldancer.org/ http://perldancer.org/ Users of Mojolicious: https://github.com/mojolicious/mojo/wiki/Projects-and-Companies-using-Mojolicious https://github.com/mojolicious/mojo/wiki/Projects-and-Compan...
moltar 6y ago
Yes, working on a greenfield project for one of the largest companies you’ve heard of.
embit 6y ago
Don’t forget Craigslist
reddit_clone 6y ago
I use (Raku) for shell scripting and system administration. Bash scripts more than 10 lines long scare me.
asicsp 6y ago
See also: https://twitter.com/briandfoy_perl/status/1324909978856075265 https://twitter.com/briandfoy_perl/status/132490997885607526...
jgoodknight 6y ago
http://ziprecruiter.com http://ziprecruiter.com is largely written in perl
mtnGoat 6y ago
These responses are great, glad to hear perl is alive and well. I miss working with it and need to use it more often.
ur-whale 6y ago
Yes, absolutely, perl is part of my standard toolbox for some specific tasks, and I'd say I use it at least once a week. For example, for short scripts to process/massage data - either one shot or in a production pipeline -, it's very expressive and "to the point", especially if you're going to use regexps. perl is in particular way less verbose than e.g. python when it comes to regexes coz regexes are built into the basic syntax of the language. OTOH, there are many, many things that are broken in perl, but if I had to cite two things that made me kind of give up on it for new large and mid-level complexity projects these would be: - near impossible to predict perl's handling of "numerical" values - having to type dollar signs to dereference variables
stevekemp 6y ago
There are Perl interface libraries for everything, so it is often a really great choice, even if it is no longer sexy now that the peak CGI-days have gone. One thing that I like about Go is that it promotes testing as something that should be required, but in my experience the vast majority of Perl modules also come with very good test-case coverage, it being the source of the TAP format after all! I've written a few new sites and APIs using the CGI::Application framework over the past few years, and I'll often knock up simple transformation scripts in Perl to glue APIs together and perform ad-hoc transformation of various tools. Although I've mostly started writing new services in golang I don't feel the need to go back and rewrite stable systems in perl.
forinti 6y ago
I have lots of programs for loading data from files or sites into a database. I also have a few Telegram bots written in Perl.
AQXt 6y ago
Booking.com, a $73 billion company, uses Perl. It is both "legacy" and "active development". s/legacy/valuable/g;
jdoege 6y ago
Many industries use Perl 5 to keep things running. The semiconductor industry, in particular uses a lot of existing, and develops a lot of new, Perl code to do things commercial software cannot.

There are "real" companies using Perl presently...Booking and DuckDuckGo and others. Looking at Redmonk, Tiobe, other surveys...Perl isn't at the top of the heap by any measure but it also stubbornly refuses to die. I write Perl every day and frankly don't care if people think it is "dead", and even I am surprised at how prominent it figures in language surveys, still. Most of the key libraries I use are updated regularly. Perl itself is under active development with regular releases.

1996 6y ago

I do. Ideal for deploying on light (edge) servers.

hpcjoe 6y ago

Yes. Quite a few tools and products at $dayjob are Perl with active development, multiple large scale revenue numbers attached to them. I use perl daily in my work on supercomputers and hpc systems. My code helps configure and control them. It helps simplify users work. No. Perl is not dead by any measure.

sigzero 6y ago

I use it every day for sysadmin stuff.

redis_mlc 6y ago

Perl is still probably the best scripting language overall from the standpoint of forward references and type-checking. Whenever you see some Java or C programmer saying they can't accept the lack of type-checking in scripting languages, they're almost never talking about Perl. Also, Perl has the most powerful web framework, Mojolicious.

bachmeier 6y ago

I think it's very widely used for its original purpose, which is a shell replacement. When I need a short script, particularly for text processing, I'll usually reach for Perl now that the Perl 5/Perl 6 thing has been resolved. Just look at the activity on CPAN: https://metacpan.org/recent https://metacpan.org/recent There are two heavily developed/used web frameworks for Perl: https://mojolicious.org/ https://mojolicious.org/ and http://perldancer.org/ http://perldancer.org/ Users of Mojolicious: https://github.com/mojolicious/mojo/wiki/Projects-and-Companies-using-Mojolicious https://github.com/mojolicious/mojo/wiki/Projects-and-Compan...

moltar 6y ago

Yes, working on a greenfield project for one of the largest companies you’ve heard of.

embit 6y ago

Don’t forget Craigslist

reddit_clone 6y ago

I use (Raku) for shell scripting and system administration. Bash scripts more than 10 lines long scare me.

asicsp 6y ago

See also: https://twitter.com/briandfoy_perl/status/1324909978856075265 https://twitter.com/briandfoy_perl/status/132490997885607526...

jgoodknight 6y ago

http://ziprecruiter.com http://ziprecruiter.com is largely written in perl

mtnGoat 6y ago

These responses are great, glad to hear perl is alive and well. I miss working with it and need to use it more often.

ur-whale 6y ago

Yes, absolutely, perl is part of my standard toolbox for some specific tasks, and I'd say I use it at least once a week. For example, for short scripts to process/massage data - either one shot or in a production pipeline -, it's very expressive and "to the point", especially if you're going to use regexps. perl is in particular way less verbose than e.g. python when it comes to regexes coz regexes are built into the basic syntax of the language. OTOH, there are many, many things that are broken in perl, but if I had to cite two things that made me kind of give up on it for new large and mid-level complexity projects these would be: - near impossible to predict perl's handling of "numerical" values - having to type dollar signs to dereference variables

stevekemp 6y ago

There are Perl interface libraries for everything, so it is often a really great choice, even if it is no longer sexy now that the peak CGI-days have gone. One thing that I like about Go is that it promotes testing as something that should be required, but in my experience the vast majority of Perl modules also come with very good test-case coverage, it being the source of the TAP format after all! I've written a few new sites and APIs using the CGI::Application framework over the past few years, and I'll often knock up simple transformation scripts in Perl to glue APIs together and perform ad-hoc transformation of various tools. Although I've mostly started writing new services in golang I don't feel the need to go back and rewrite stable systems in perl.

forinti 6y ago

I have lots of programs for loading data from files or sites into a database. I also have a few Telegram bots written in Perl.

AQXt 6y ago

Booking.com, a $73 billion company, uses Perl. It is both "legacy" and "active development". s/legacy/valuable/g;

jdoege 6y ago

Many industries use Perl 5 to keep things running. The semiconductor industry, in particular uses a lot of existing, and develops a lot of new, Perl code to do things commercial software cannot.