Is Perl used nowadays?
Well, I see little about Perl and do not know much about the language, it is still used nowadays and can replace some other language like PHP or Ruby? I do not know exactly what Perl does but as I see little about, and it seemed interesting to me, I would like to know if there is any reason why it is not much talked about if it is no longer used or if it is simply not worth it.
1 answers
Yes, it is quite used. But not as much as it was in the past. Part due to the fact that the language is a bit unreadable, as it has become legendary, part because the language did not evolve well, even taking almost decades to come out a Version major new that was quite incompatible with the previous version, the result of a project too ambitious that never worked and several wrong decisions, and part because it today than before, and finally part because other languages have been coming up with better alternatives.
Still has one or the other crazy that starts in it. But the bulk of the use is from those who were already used to it. Some adopt it because they take some open source software written on it and go on developing it using it. It has some very good web software written with Perl. Contrary to what many people think it can be used for almost everything, even GUI.
I don't like it many of these sites that measure popularity of languages but all show that the language still has appeal:
- TOP 10 in The Transparent Language Popularity Index (somewhat outdated, but quite reliable)
- top 20 no Stack Overflow survey in 2017
- TOP 20 no PYPL PopularitY of Programming Language
- TOP 20 do the 2016 Top Programming Languages
- top 15 of the RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: June 2017
- pinching the top 10 of the TIOBE Index for July 2017
One case that can be very enlightening is the GitHub usage trend. I don't like any criteria because it always hides uses that don't appear publicly. I'm sure people use COBOL more than they imagine, only that no one publishes anything about it, the query is made in the official documentation and does not get spread over the internet generating hype , it's all internal project, no need to launch books, no easy job exchange in this area. But if you want to see in Perl code projects it can still be TOP 15 in active repositories and close to this in pushes. But it falls well on forks, issues and watchers .
One of the most used languages in Brazil is xBase. Which is an umbrella for several dialects of one language. And a lot of people don't know that. So these statistics only show what they can see. Brazil is a different market. For example, Python seems popular in the world, but there is even a joke that Python programmer is always unemployed, which is an obvious exaggeration... he always knows another language to employ it:) even though that changed after I wrote that text.