Perl isn't dead but its usage is not growing and I don't see any reason it will ever grow again. Unless you're an old school Perl hacker there's little reason t

Perl isn't dead but its usage is not growing and I don't see any reason it will ever grow again. Unless you're an old school Perl hacker there's little reason to start a green field project with it today. I say that as someone that has written a lot of Perl over the years. It turned out to be an awesome language for CGI apps in the early days of the web (the reason I learned it). It was also a better system administration/automation language than some bash/awk/sed/grep amalgamation. For me at least it fell down once you got over a few hundred lines. The TMTOWTDOI led to your own (or at least my) code being internally inconsistent and the lure of its shorthand meant coming back to old code took some effort to understand. I moved from Perl to Python and it helped immensely with both those problems. Once I grokked Python's regex I could do everything in Python I used to do in Perl with the same speed but half the effort. I don't see any attraction of going back to Perl. It was a nice tool for a time but now there's better tools (IMO). So once old deployments of Perl apps/tools are replaced I really don't think they're going to be replaced with Perl.