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The thing I find interesting about this article is the brief discussion about the death of PERL. In particular the comment about the inability to find senior de

The thing I find interesting about this article is the brief discussion about the death of PERL. In particular the comment about the inability to find senior developers in PERL. This is a sad development for those of us who really love programming in PERL, but I think eventually one must recognize that a language is fading, however slowly, into obsolescence. Apart from Crowdtilt I don't know any other successful startups or major companies that rely on PERL. And if one wants all the benefits of a network effect of developers, libraries and technical support, it seems today a backend developer really needs to shift his or her focus to Python, Ruby or (bleagh) PHP

byroot 13y ago
> In particular the comment about the inability to find senior developers in PERL. One thing to know is that Manwin (youporn, pornhub, etc parent company) is located in Montreal. For a reason I can't really explain, you mostly find PHP and C# developers here, so most Montreal startups are PHP based. I also interviewed a couple Manwin alumnis, and they told me that they were a couple hundred developers and that there is a huge turnover (you often see a 6 month / 1 year experience at Manwin when you read a PHP dev resume). So it's easy to understand that they prefer to use the local dominant language, it do not mean that Perl is globally dying, just that they have specific constraints. And to be fair Perl is not the only small community in MTL, Ruby and Python also have a strangely small community here.
- euphemize 13y ago
  other Montrealer here - I also wondered why that is. Especially considering the amount of gaming companies around here, you'd think a lot of C++ would be in order. I have met quite a few rubyists, but python seems rarely used. PHP coders were always available, wherever I lived though :)
  - canadiancreed 13y ago
    I've found in my job searching over the last few years that if you have a resume with good ruby chops, Montreal is the place to go. Seems to have the largest share of jobs in that area, at least from what I've seen.
- derefr 13y ago
  > For a reason I can't really explain, you mostly find PHP and C# developers here Same here in Vancouver; I always figured the C# part was just our proximity to Redmond (and then PHP because it's the only language that doesn't impinge upon C#'s niche) but I guess it's more of a Canada-wide thing. Weird.
  - tracker1 13y ago
    In the Phoenix area C# is king, followed by Java. Most development tends to be around business' internal applications... I've seen a small bit of PHP, Ruby and Python though... In the past two years NodeJS has probably passed them all, aside from C# for new development around here.
    - kbenson 13y ago
      Maybe it has to do with what the local college CS department standardizes on.
- canadiancreed 13y ago
  Finding the same thing here in Toronto, to the point of where I've seen two perl developer positions advertised here since I came back in early '12. Meanwhile there's tons of (usually poorly paying) PHP gigs, along with Java, and to a slightly lesser extent, C, C# and mobile. That being said, I found the two Perl places to be very accepting of those that didn't have experience in Perl, but in other languages (and wanted to escape to something better). Can't say the same for other language shops. tl;dr Perl devs seem to be in short supply country wide, along with jobs that would need their skillset.
samwillis 13y ago
Most of the BBC's public sites are built with Pearl, including BBC News. I believe thy use other tools for internal sites and other stuff though.
- companyman 13y ago
  I've been at the beeb for the best part of a decade and can say that thi used to be the case, but no new sites have been built using Perl for a very long time. Nowadays the vast majority of sites are built using Java services and a PHP frontend. There is still some legacy Perl about running some fairly critical systems, but there are very few people in the place who could regard themselves as full time perl devs.
MBCook 13y ago
I wondered if he was referring to the fact that they didn't have the staff in house and would have to find someone, as opposed to a general lack of talent in the marketplace.
justinmares 13y ago
I believe DuckDuckGo is using Perl, or were as of a few years ago. Source: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/03/duck-duck-go-architecture.html http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/03/duck-duck-go-arc...
- jamesjporter 13y ago
  This plugin infrastructure uses Perl, so they definitely haven't moved away from it entirely http://duckduckhack.com/ http://duckduckhack.com/
  - aroman 13y ago
    Talking to a friend of mine who works there, they haven't moved away from it at all really. They've been optimizing the heck out of it, and as much as my kneejerk reaction to their infrastructure is "a collage of rubberbands and paperclips waiting to break in unexpected and unpredictable ways", I've gotta hand it to them for not giving in to the temptation to prematurely optimize. Clearly it's been working really well for them, and so I guess it's worth not "fixing" it until it starts breaking.
- boyter 13y ago
  Blekko is another, which is very impressive considering they do their own indexing and serving of results.
- clark-kent 13y ago
  Craigslist also uses perl: http://www.craigslist.org/about/craigslist_is_hiring#pd http://www.craigslist.org/about/craigslist_is_hiring#pd
drone 13y ago
Alas, I've experienced a lot of this. A current project I'm working on, I've done in Mojolicious. Why? Because I had no interest in learning another toolkit that provided me no real benefits other than the language it was based on was more popular. And, the time spent learning another toolkit was time not spent developing. The first question the rest of the board asked me was "Well, are we going to have trouble hiring?" To which, I truthfully replied "No." The interesting part about non-popular languages, is that you're going to have fewer unqualified candidates. (And yes, in my local market, there are still a lot of perl programmers, maybe not as many as Ruby programmers, but the average perl programmer I come into contact with has more years of experience than the average Ruby programmer I come into contact with.) I think the argument "we can't hire people that know X" is nearly always the wrong one. Several years ago, when we looked to re-build core services for a product (replacing perl with Erlang, natch!) - we couldn't hire a person that knew Erlang to save our lives. So, we hired good developers in other languages and trained them. If you've got the right technology and the the right tools, you can always find the right people.
- eitally 13y ago
  This is not always true, especially if there are business-imposed constraints on hiring (or technology).
mhd 13y ago
I'd argue that CPAN accounts for quite a bit of "network effect", never mind that there's still a considerable amount of googleable "I have this error, let's see if someone else had it before me" type of dicussions out there. Certainly more than some hip, yet newer languages (e.g. Haskell, Go). So you're not really scraping the bottom of the barrel here. I think the YP people weren't just going for some senior developers, they wanted a huge pool, probably with easy enough replacement if someone is going. Considering that not everyone wants to have a porn site on their CV, or might want to quit once they start a family and would have to explain where daddy/mommy works, that seems like a good idea anyway. So you need the largest pool possible, which generally boils down to either PHP or Java, with the latter being a bit more expensive.
- swift 13y ago
  Perhaps surprisingly, while it's technically true that Haskell is a newer language than Perl, the difference is only three years - Perl dates from 1987 and Haskell dates from 1990. I wouldn't put it in the same bucket as Go, which dates from 2009.
bigiain 13y ago
(cynical meta-comment) Curiously, anyone who's been involved in the Perl community for any length of time will see "PERL" there and dismiss the poster out-of-hand. The decade-or-two old catchphrase goes something like: "Perl" is the name of the language. "perl" is the implementation/interpreter. There's no such thing as "PERL".
- cheald 13y ago
  Lua gets this, as well, except in Lua's case, it never even had an acronym associated with it. People who type LUA insta-brand themselves as outsiders.
  - peter-fogg 13y ago
    I find that I dismiss pretty nearly anyone who refers to a programming language in all caps. Outside of FORTRAN, COBOL, and C.*, it just looks ridiculous -- SCHEME, ERLANG, LISP, JAVA...
    - JulianMorrison 13y ago
      Rule: you're allowed to use all caps to name any language that originally had to be programmed on terminals without lowercase letters.
      - innguest 13y ago
        So LISP? :)
    - hboon 13y ago
      Also add a special case "SmallTalk" for instant dismissal. It's Smalltalk.
      - bigiain 13y ago
        Heh, of _all_ languages – you'd have thought Perl would end up with CamelCase. "PeRl" – nah…
avar 13y ago
It's interesting that someone who professes loving to program in Perl refers to it as "PERL". People who refer to it in all-caps instantly give themselves away as outsiders to the language. It's like someone claiming to be a senior JAVA programmer, it's not an acronym. Anyway we use Perl pretty much exclusively at Booking.com, and I'm pretty sure we're at least a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than the likes of Crowdtilt. There's a bunch of other interesting companies using Perl as well, a lot of them just don't make as much of a fuss about it as the companies using say Ruby. Last I knew e.g. Morgan Stanley used it for most everything, including new developments, and it alone probably employs more programmers using it than the combined hobbyist contributor base of some newer emerging languages. It's pretty hard to claim that Perl is "dead" and square that with the ongoing activity on the CPAN (https://metacpan.org/recent https://metacpan.org/recent). This is not the kind of activity a dead language gets. I think what a lot of people mix up is that just because something isn't as big as it was before doesn't mean it's dead. C isn't as big relatively as it was in the 80s, Perl isn't relatively as ubiquitous for scripting and web development as it was in the 90s, but neither of those languages are dead. If you look at the total amount of contributions / software written for any of the languages that aren't currently in the spotlight you'll most likely find that we're at the high water mark of the number of the amount of software written in them, and the number of people that have been employed to write software in them, just because the industry as a whole is getting bigger every day. Maybe they're not bigger relatively compared to some other languages. But that has little bearing on how good they are when it comes to using them in your toolchain. If anything they're better than they've ever been before.
- nonchalance 13y ago
  > People who refer to it in all-caps instantly give themselves away as outsiders to the language. It's actually laid out in perlfaq1 ($ perldoc perlfaq1) What's the difference between "perl" and "Perl"? One bit. Oh, you weren't talking ASCII? :-) Larry now uses "Perl" to signify the language proper and "perl" the implementation of it, i.e. the current interpreter. Hence Tom's quip that "Nothing but perl can parse Perl." Before the first edition of Programming perl, people commonly referred to the language as "perl", and its name appeared that way in the title because it referred to the interpreter. In the book, Randal Schwartz capitalised the language's name to make it stand out better when typeset. This convention was adopted by the community, and the second edition became Programming Perl, using the capitalized version of the name to refer to the language. You may or may not choose to follow this usage. For example, parallelism means "awk and perl" and "Python and Perl" look good, while "awk and Perl" and "Python and perl" do not. But never write "PERL", because perl is not an acronym, apocryphal folklore and post-facto expansions notwithstanding. > I think what a lot of people mix up is that just because something isn't as big as it was before doesn't mean it's dead. I wonder if the Perl6 chasm tainted outsiders' perspectives on perl and the community
xxpor 13y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl high-traffic websites that use Perl extensively include Amazon.com, bbc.co.uk, Priceline.com, Craigslist, IMDb, LiveJournal, Slashdot and Ticketmaster.
- AsymetricCom 13y ago
  I have so much to say about this, but I'm not sure what would be covered under NDA, so I'll just say that learning Perl is not a bad idea for your IT career, especially if you're starting out. Perl is great in that it keeps concepts of low level data structures and linux constructs in the syntax so you can go either up or down the stack with it easily. It's very similar to a compiled language in performance and there is a rainbow of forks and derivative technologies that are so tuned and mature, they make SQL look like a social experiment. A lot of these technologies are just another unremarkable file in CPAN.
callmeed 13y ago
See http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=Perl&l=San+Francisco%2C+CA&relative=1 http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=Perl&l=San+Francisco%2C+CA... When I worked in online education in the .com 1.0 days, a lot of the big tools were built on Perl (both Blackboard and WebCT I think). I'm sure some of them still use it.
angersock 13y ago
Don't feel too bad about the other posters complaining about your choice of capitalization; at my shop we spell it "ruby".
groovy2shoes 13y ago
Apart from Crowdtilt I don't know any other successful startups or major companies that rely on PERL. At the very least, I know EMC and Qualcomm both rely heavily on Perl internally. At EMC there has been some shift to Python, but Perl is still the clear winner. Startups are more likely to use the new shiny, but Perl is still kicking in the enterprise.
gootik 13y ago
Thanks everyone. I came into the comments to learn what everyone thinks of their usage of Redis as a database and how their stack is set up. Now I know what's the correct way of typing Perl...

byroot 13y ago

> In particular the comment about the inability to find senior developers in PERL. One thing to know is that Manwin (youporn, pornhub, etc parent company) is located in Montreal. For a reason I can't really explain, you mostly find PHP and C# developers here, so most Montreal startups are PHP based. I also interviewed a couple Manwin alumnis, and they told me that they were a couple hundred developers and that there is a huge turnover (you often see a 6 month / 1 year experience at Manwin when you read a PHP dev resume). So it's easy to understand that they prefer to use the local dominant language, it do not mean that Perl is globally dying, just that they have specific constraints. And to be fair Perl is not the only small community in MTL, Ruby and Python also have a strangely small community here.

euphemize 13y ago
other Montrealer here - I also wondered why that is. Especially considering the amount of gaming companies around here, you'd think a lot of C++ would be in order. I have met quite a few rubyists, but python seems rarely used. PHP coders were always available, wherever I lived though :)
- canadiancreed 13y ago
  I've found in my job searching over the last few years that if you have a resume with good ruby chops, Montreal is the place to go. Seems to have the largest share of jobs in that area, at least from what I've seen.
derefr 13y ago
> For a reason I can't really explain, you mostly find PHP and C# developers here Same here in Vancouver; I always figured the C# part was just our proximity to Redmond (and then PHP because it's the only language that doesn't impinge upon C#'s niche) but I guess it's more of a Canada-wide thing. Weird.
- tracker1 13y ago
  In the Phoenix area C# is king, followed by Java. Most development tends to be around business' internal applications... I've seen a small bit of PHP, Ruby and Python though... In the past two years NodeJS has probably passed them all, aside from C# for new development around here.
  - kbenson 13y ago
    Maybe it has to do with what the local college CS department standardizes on.
canadiancreed 13y ago
Finding the same thing here in Toronto, to the point of where I've seen two perl developer positions advertised here since I came back in early '12. Meanwhile there's tons of (usually poorly paying) PHP gigs, along with Java, and to a slightly lesser extent, C, C# and mobile. That being said, I found the two Perl places to be very accepting of those that didn't have experience in Perl, but in other languages (and wanted to escape to something better). Can't say the same for other language shops. tl;dr Perl devs seem to be in short supply country wide, along with jobs that would need their skillset.

samwillis 13y ago

Most of the BBC's public sites are built with Pearl, including BBC News. I believe thy use other tools for internal sites and other stuff though.

companyman 13y ago
I've been at the beeb for the best part of a decade and can say that thi used to be the case, but no new sites have been built using Perl for a very long time. Nowadays the vast majority of sites are built using Java services and a PHP frontend. There is still some legacy Perl about running some fairly critical systems, but there are very few people in the place who could regard themselves as full time perl devs.

MBCook 13y ago

I wondered if he was referring to the fact that they didn't have the staff in house and would have to find someone, as opposed to a general lack of talent in the marketplace.

justinmares 13y ago

I believe DuckDuckGo is using Perl, or were as of a few years ago. Source: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/03/duck-duck-go-architecture.html http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/03/duck-duck-go-arc...

jamesjporter 13y ago
This plugin infrastructure uses Perl, so they definitely haven't moved away from it entirely http://duckduckhack.com/ http://duckduckhack.com/
- aroman 13y ago
  Talking to a friend of mine who works there, they haven't moved away from it at all really. They've been optimizing the heck out of it, and as much as my kneejerk reaction to their infrastructure is "a collage of rubberbands and paperclips waiting to break in unexpected and unpredictable ways", I've gotta hand it to them for not giving in to the temptation to prematurely optimize. Clearly it's been working really well for them, and so I guess it's worth not "fixing" it until it starts breaking.
boyter 13y ago
Blekko is another, which is very impressive considering they do their own indexing and serving of results.
clark-kent 13y ago
Craigslist also uses perl: http://www.craigslist.org/about/craigslist_is_hiring#pd http://www.craigslist.org/about/craigslist_is_hiring#pd

drone 13y ago

Alas, I've experienced a lot of this. A current project I'm working on, I've done in Mojolicious. Why? Because I had no interest in learning another toolkit that provided me no real benefits other than the language it was based on was more popular. And, the time spent learning another toolkit was time not spent developing. The first question the rest of the board asked me was "Well, are we going to have trouble hiring?" To which, I truthfully replied "No." The interesting part about non-popular languages, is that you're going to have fewer unqualified candidates. (And yes, in my local market, there are still a lot of perl programmers, maybe not as many as Ruby programmers, but the average perl programmer I come into contact with has more years of experience than the average Ruby programmer I come into contact with.) I think the argument "we can't hire people that know X" is nearly always the wrong one. Several years ago, when we looked to re-build core services for a product (replacing perl with Erlang, natch!) - we couldn't hire a person that knew Erlang to save our lives. So, we hired good developers in other languages and trained them. If you've got the right technology and the the right tools, you can always find the right people.

eitally 13y ago
This is not always true, especially if there are business-imposed constraints on hiring (or technology).

mhd 13y ago

I'd argue that CPAN accounts for quite a bit of "network effect", never mind that there's still a considerable amount of googleable "I have this error, let's see if someone else had it before me" type of dicussions out there. Certainly more than some hip, yet newer languages (e.g. Haskell, Go). So you're not really scraping the bottom of the barrel here. I think the YP people weren't just going for some senior developers, they wanted a huge pool, probably with easy enough replacement if someone is going. Considering that not everyone wants to have a porn site on their CV, or might want to quit once they start a family and would have to explain where daddy/mommy works, that seems like a good idea anyway. So you need the largest pool possible, which generally boils down to either PHP or Java, with the latter being a bit more expensive.

swift 13y ago
Perhaps surprisingly, while it's technically true that Haskell is a newer language than Perl, the difference is only three years - Perl dates from 1987 and Haskell dates from 1990. I wouldn't put it in the same bucket as Go, which dates from 2009.

bigiain 13y ago

(cynical meta-comment) Curiously, anyone who's been involved in the Perl community for any length of time will see "PERL" there and dismiss the poster out-of-hand. The decade-or-two old catchphrase goes something like: "Perl" is the name of the language. "perl" is the implementation/interpreter. There's no such thing as "PERL".

cheald 13y ago
Lua gets this, as well, except in Lua's case, it never even had an acronym associated with it. People who type LUA insta-brand themselves as outsiders.
- peter-fogg 13y ago
  I find that I dismiss pretty nearly anyone who refers to a programming language in all caps. Outside of FORTRAN, COBOL, and C.*, it just looks ridiculous -- SCHEME, ERLANG, LISP, JAVA...
  - JulianMorrison 13y ago
    Rule: you're allowed to use all caps to name any language that originally had to be programmed on terminals without lowercase letters.
    - innguest 13y ago
      So LISP? :)
  - hboon 13y ago
    Also add a special case "SmallTalk" for instant dismissal. It's Smalltalk.
    - bigiain 13y ago
      Heh, of _all_ languages – you'd have thought Perl would end up with CamelCase. "PeRl" – nah…

avar 13y ago

It's interesting that someone who professes loving to program in Perl refers to it as "PERL". People who refer to it in all-caps instantly give themselves away as outsiders to the language. It's like someone claiming to be a senior JAVA programmer, it's not an acronym. Anyway we use Perl pretty much exclusively at Booking.com, and I'm pretty sure we're at least a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than the likes of Crowdtilt. There's a bunch of other interesting companies using Perl as well, a lot of them just don't make as much of a fuss about it as the companies using say Ruby. Last I knew e.g. Morgan Stanley used it for most everything, including new developments, and it alone probably employs more programmers using it than the combined hobbyist contributor base of some newer emerging languages. It's pretty hard to claim that Perl is "dead" and square that with the ongoing activity on the CPAN (https://metacpan.org/recent https://metacpan.org/recent). This is not the kind of activity a dead language gets. I think what a lot of people mix up is that just because something isn't as big as it was before doesn't mean it's dead. C isn't as big relatively as it was in the 80s, Perl isn't relatively as ubiquitous for scripting and web development as it was in the 90s, but neither of those languages are dead. If you look at the total amount of contributions / software written for any of the languages that aren't currently in the spotlight you'll most likely find that we're at the high water mark of the number of the amount of software written in them, and the number of people that have been employed to write software in them, just because the industry as a whole is getting bigger every day. Maybe they're not bigger relatively compared to some other languages. But that has little bearing on how good they are when it comes to using them in your toolchain. If anything they're better than they've ever been before.

nonchalance 13y ago
> People who refer to it in all-caps instantly give themselves away as outsiders to the language. It's actually laid out in perlfaq1 ($ perldoc perlfaq1) What's the difference between "perl" and "Perl"? One bit. Oh, you weren't talking ASCII? :-) Larry now uses "Perl" to signify the language proper and "perl" the implementation of it, i.e. the current interpreter. Hence Tom's quip that "Nothing but perl can parse Perl." Before the first edition of Programming perl, people commonly referred to the language as "perl", and its name appeared that way in the title because it referred to the interpreter. In the book, Randal Schwartz capitalised the language's name to make it stand out better when typeset. This convention was adopted by the community, and the second edition became Programming Perl, using the capitalized version of the name to refer to the language. You may or may not choose to follow this usage. For example, parallelism means "awk and perl" and "Python and Perl" look good, while "awk and Perl" and "Python and perl" do not. But never write "PERL", because perl is not an acronym, apocryphal folklore and post-facto expansions notwithstanding. > I think what a lot of people mix up is that just because something isn't as big as it was before doesn't mean it's dead. I wonder if the Perl6 chasm tainted outsiders' perspectives on perl and the community

xxpor 13y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl high-traffic websites that use Perl extensively include Amazon.com, bbc.co.uk, Priceline.com, Craigslist, IMDb, LiveJournal, Slashdot and Ticketmaster.

AsymetricCom 13y ago
I have so much to say about this, but I'm not sure what would be covered under NDA, so I'll just say that learning Perl is not a bad idea for your IT career, especially if you're starting out. Perl is great in that it keeps concepts of low level data structures and linux constructs in the syntax so you can go either up or down the stack with it easily. It's very similar to a compiled language in performance and there is a rainbow of forks and derivative technologies that are so tuned and mature, they make SQL look like a social experiment. A lot of these technologies are just another unremarkable file in CPAN.

callmeed 13y ago

See http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=Perl&l=San+Francisco%2C+CA&relative=1 http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=Perl&l=San+Francisco%2C+CA... When I worked in online education in the .com 1.0 days, a lot of the big tools were built on Perl (both Blackboard and WebCT I think). I'm sure some of them still use it.

angersock 13y ago

Don't feel too bad about the other posters complaining about your choice of capitalization; at my shop we spell it "ruby".

groovy2shoes 13y ago

Apart from Crowdtilt I don't know any other successful startups or major companies that rely on PERL. At the very least, I know EMC and Qualcomm both rely heavily on Perl internally. At EMC there has been some shift to Python, but Perl is still the clear winner. Startups are more likely to use the new shiny, but Perl is still kicking in the enterprise.

gootik 13y ago

Thanks everyone. I came into the comments to learn what everyone thinks of their usage of Redis as a database and how their stack is set up. Now I know what's the correct way of typing Perl...