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While the authors accusation audit is impressive, I can assure you, as a CPAN contributor and someone who has launched some very successful Perl web apps, that

While the authors accusation audit is impressive, I can assure you, as a CPAN contributor and someone who has launched some very successful Perl web apps, that Perl is in fact, completely and utterly dead. It died well over a decade ago when all focus moved to Perl 6 which didn’t emerge until recently. Everyone moved on except a hardcore group of advocates. They aren’t coming back. If a new language and community emerges that happens to have the same name, I’ll certainly take a look. That hasn’t happened yet. And it’s a damn shame because the mod_perl list and community had some killer talent in it that was creating the most innovative and heigh performance web applications out there. I created WorkZoo in Perl which was a very high performance job meta search engine and was one of Time Magazines top 50 sites in 2005. What happened to Perl is a damn shame. Many of us went over to PHP which is vibrant, keeps getting faster and better and is as practical as Perl was and hasn’t stalled.

kamaal 5y ago
>>Many of us went over to PHP which is vibrant, keeps getting faster and better and is as practical as Perl was and hasn’t stalled. Who uses php these days? I haven't heard any one start a new php project in years. Ruby seems to have gone the same way. Python seems to have won the backend game, which actually makes sense as Python today is bloated like how Perl was once. And these days it feels like Perl with tab indentation. No wonder it fanatic following these days. Frontend game is now owned by Node, ReactJS, JS etc. Who uses php to do anything? In fact I don't know of a single college kid I've hired who has even looked at php let alone used it.
- nrdvana 5y ago
  WordPress, Drupal, Magento, Joomla, OpenCart and lots of other open source community CMS and online web-store type things are built on it. Sadly it will never die because it has Facebook pouring money into it.
- mgkimsal 5y ago
  Why is "college kid skills" relevant for anything? Do you make tech and business decisions based on what your incoming jr people want to do? Many people in my circles use PHP for ... lots of stuff. I just got back from a PHP conference, and saw hundreds of people there are using it. "Python seems to have won the backend game" - I'm really curious where you get that impression from. I can't imagine it's relating to publicly available web servers. That's not a total view of everything, of course, but... absent other numbers/studies/reports, it's really hard to draw any conclusions that aren't just based on personal experience.
handrous 5y ago
What's missing from Perl 5, would you say, that's holding it back? Performance? Language features? The "line noise" stigma? (yet, Haskell is trendy and it's at least as "line noise" looking to me, in typical use, as typical Perl is...) Package management and other tools?
- Tanjreeve 5y ago
  Why do you believe Haskell is trendy? I love it as a language but it seems very much not trendy in terms of usage vs something like rust where a lot of people seem to be doing things.
  - JoelMcCracken 5y ago
    I mean, its relatively trendy right, compared to Perl? Many still hold it up as a model PL in various ways. I'm always promoting it myself ;)
- mmaunder 5y ago
  Release cadence. Trendy isn't a factor for a productive dev.
  - handrous 5y ago
    > Trendy isn't a factor for a productive dev. It can matter, since companies want to see experience with what they're using, when they hire, so developers don't want to get stuck in something that's declining. Hype and perceived popularity-trajectory definitely matter for keeping a language alive, and for hiring (devs will tend not to want to take your job if they'll be working with things they consider to be legacy and trending downward).
- munificent 5y ago
  This is a bit like asking what's wrong with your ranch by describing the grass. The problem is there's no cows on it. You might argue that sufficiently appealing grass might persuade cows on other ranches to jump the fence and come over, but the reality is that the grass on those other ranches is very nice at this point and getting greener faster than the grass on Perl Ranch. The users are gone and aren't coming back. Without those, you don't have a language.
forgotpwd16 5y ago
>Many of us went over to PHP which is vibrant, keeps getting faster and better and is as practical as Perl was and hasn’t stalled. Funny as, quite similar to Perl, it took about a decade for a new major version (v. 7) and in the meantime there was a failed experiment (v. 6). And, quite similar to Perl, people were saying PHP is a dying language only alive thanks to some old major projects (WordPress, ...) that are written in it. Moreover, exactly like this very blog post, there were articles written saying that PHP is not dead.
- xav0989 5y ago
  You also had facebook pumping resources into PHP with HPHPc, HHVM, trying to compile a spec, etc. That definitely would have helped keep PHP alive through the period between PHP 5 and PHP 7. Additionally, PHP's releases of 5.3, 5.4, and 5.5 introduced enough new functionality that the bump was more than incremental. It had backwards-breaking changes, which should have warranted a new major release if PHP followed semver.
- tkinom 5y ago
  Old Programming Languages never die, they just fade away.

kamaal 5y ago

>>Many of us went over to PHP which is vibrant, keeps getting faster and better and is as practical as Perl was and hasn’t stalled. Who uses php these days? I haven't heard any one start a new php project in years. Ruby seems to have gone the same way. Python seems to have won the backend game, which actually makes sense as Python today is bloated like how Perl was once. And these days it feels like Perl with tab indentation. No wonder it fanatic following these days. Frontend game is now owned by Node, ReactJS, JS etc. Who uses php to do anything? In fact I don't know of a single college kid I've hired who has even looked at php let alone used it.

nrdvana 5y ago
WordPress, Drupal, Magento, Joomla, OpenCart and lots of other open source community CMS and online web-store type things are built on it. Sadly it will never die because it has Facebook pouring money into it.
mgkimsal 5y ago
Why is "college kid skills" relevant for anything? Do you make tech and business decisions based on what your incoming jr people want to do? Many people in my circles use PHP for ... lots of stuff. I just got back from a PHP conference, and saw hundreds of people there are using it. "Python seems to have won the backend game" - I'm really curious where you get that impression from. I can't imagine it's relating to publicly available web servers. That's not a total view of everything, of course, but... absent other numbers/studies/reports, it's really hard to draw any conclusions that aren't just based on personal experience.

handrous 5y ago

What's missing from Perl 5, would you say, that's holding it back? Performance? Language features? The "line noise" stigma? (yet, Haskell is trendy and it's at least as "line noise" looking to me, in typical use, as typical Perl is...) Package management and other tools?

Tanjreeve 5y ago
Why do you believe Haskell is trendy? I love it as a language but it seems very much not trendy in terms of usage vs something like rust where a lot of people seem to be doing things.
- JoelMcCracken 5y ago
  I mean, its relatively trendy right, compared to Perl? Many still hold it up as a model PL in various ways. I'm always promoting it myself ;)
mmaunder 5y ago
Release cadence. Trendy isn't a factor for a productive dev.
- handrous 5y ago
  > Trendy isn't a factor for a productive dev. It can matter, since companies want to see experience with what they're using, when they hire, so developers don't want to get stuck in something that's declining. Hype and perceived popularity-trajectory definitely matter for keeping a language alive, and for hiring (devs will tend not to want to take your job if they'll be working with things they consider to be legacy and trending downward).
munificent 5y ago
This is a bit like asking what's wrong with your ranch by describing the grass. The problem is there's no cows on it. You might argue that sufficiently appealing grass might persuade cows on other ranches to jump the fence and come over, but the reality is that the grass on those other ranches is very nice at this point and getting greener faster than the grass on Perl Ranch. The users are gone and aren't coming back. Without those, you don't have a language.

forgotpwd16 5y ago

>Many of us went over to PHP which is vibrant, keeps getting faster and better and is as practical as Perl was and hasn’t stalled. Funny as, quite similar to Perl, it took about a decade for a new major version (v. 7) and in the meantime there was a failed experiment (v. 6). And, quite similar to Perl, people were saying PHP is a dying language only alive thanks to some old major projects (WordPress, ...) that are written in it. Moreover, exactly like this very blog post, there were articles written saying that PHP is not dead.

xav0989 5y ago
You also had facebook pumping resources into PHP with HPHPc, HHVM, trying to compile a spec, etc. That definitely would have helped keep PHP alive through the period between PHP 5 and PHP 7. Additionally, PHP's releases of 5.3, 5.4, and 5.5 introduced enough new functionality that the bump was more than incremental. It had backwards-breaking changes, which should have warranted a new major release if PHP followed semver.
tkinom 5y ago
Old Programming Languages never die, they just fade away.