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Discussion on: The Perl echo chamber, marketing and … is Perl really dying?

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szabgab profile image
Gabor Szabo • Edited

Good analysis. Let me add a few point:

I think the lack of up-to-date libraries and the reluctance of companies to provide their API/SDK in Perl was already a result of the decline in the number of enthusiastic Perl programmer. By that time many of the more adventurous people have moved to other languages and created libraries there. Increasingly the people who were left using Perl were the more conservative (at least in their choice of programming language) people who did not want to make changes.

I think there was a small technical issue that started the decline of Perl: PHP was a little bit easier to get started with for web applications (rename .html to .php instead of all the CGI setups) made PHP a much easier choice in the late 90's.

Then came the Python community that made despising Perl a cultural norm. For many years it was a key part of their promotional strategy. I remember reading the "Learning Python" book a few years ago and seeing that even then, years after Python became a lot more popular than Perl they still kept the "Python is better than Perl" at the opening of the book.
I don't know if the Perl community had any chance countering this.

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smonff profile image
🌌 Sébastien Feugère ☔

First page of the Python tutorial : « Python is applicable to a much larger problem domain than Awk or even Perl, yet many things are at least as easy in Python as in those languages ».

I would say, ok, maybe for the second part, but the first one, I don’t know, they should just update the documentation, this is so rude.

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Cosimo Streppone

Thanks for commenting. I wish to emphasize that mine is not an analysis. Apart from the "Conclusions" paragraph, what this post intended was to share my personal perspective on what happened with Perl slowly fading out of my professional day-to-day activity.

It is still there, I still like it a lot and occasionally use it as well, but it is just one of many other tools at my disposal.