When I started as a junior sysadmin with zero scripting skills. I inherented many perl scripts that I just used for operational tasks.
Some of our ...
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I use Perl a lot since it is a part of my boring stack, prototypes, legacy and greenfield.
With two marvellous web-frameworks: Mojolicious and Dancer and everything CPAN/MetaCPAN. Perl is still a very useful and it have never lost it's power.
I have started writing up some tutorials on different things Perl and clicking the #perl tag did not list much, but it did lead me to your post :-)
The Git repository consists of 7.8% Perl code. So if you are using Git via the command line, you are using Perl under the hood - every day for years to come.
Wow right infront of me everyday.
It seems like it isn't an essential part though:
github.com/git/git/blob/master/INS...
I believe Booking.com folks still using Perl for most of their back-end.
confirmed: booking uses a lot of perl.
One reason which has not been discussed here is that the majority of Perl users have been using it for a long time and there is very little "flux" from new people learning it... that does not mean that Perl is a bad or an outdated language though!
I use Perl for existing stuff, and new stuff. It's still a super powerful language, and it was the first language to have a framework (Mojolicious) fully implement WebSockets.
Perl may not be the most popular language, but it's one of the most reliably-present languages, and there is still strong community support.
To make changes to existing code / services? Yes
For greenfield projects? No
We started something like 5 projects from scratch that are 95% Perl at my company in the last 3 years and there were no existing code in this language.
I actively use Perl, both for work and my personal projects. At work, it drives our backend (runs database queries, provides web resources, etc.).
I just want said two examples of use of Perl: cpanel and webmin.
Perl it's powerful. If you master Perl you will play like a child with PHP and Python and also with all their frameworks. I'm programmer in Perl since 1996 and still working. Very well paid stack by the way. Better than PHP and Python!
Where did you work? I would love to maintain those Perl scripts.
I have been building large Perl web and automation apps for about 20 years now and I haven't ever had problems finding work maintaining existing applications.
My last corp job was for a large drug testing laboratory and their whole show was run in Perl -- two large apps: one web app that I wrote, another that ran all the processing/automation. Both were over 300k+ lines of super clean, maintainable Perl code in a CI/CD pipeline and deployed to AWS ECS.
There hasn't been much new built using only Perl for 8-10 years, except by older devs that need a job (eg: me). Python has taken over Perl's niche for 'gluing together the internet', PHP5 took over the 'quick and dirty website' niche that Perl+Apache/cgi/mod_perl never made simple.
Most of the Perl code you see is unmaintainable because it was written by people that weren't software engineers ... they Google'd (or AltaVista'd) and cut/pasted bad code together until something worked. There are hundreds of JavaScript devs entering the market every year that aren't very good either, but the modern JavaScript tooling is super simple to use and makes it hard to spit out terrible code ... and Perl's tooling falls short or is difficult to get going.
These days I make my money maintaining older Perl codebases and helping (or convincing) companies it is time to convert the app to NodeJS or Python before there aren't any of us old farts (41) left to run it.
We have a team in the company I work for which does Perl, but its only for an existing client and system. As far as I know there are no new projects being created using Perl.