Perl 5 Is Dying

http://use.perl.org/~Ovid/journal/38010?from=rss

by zvikara • 18 years ago

39 88 18 years ago

use.perl.org

schtog2• 18 years ago

Good. Let Python take over the dynamic scripting language space completely.

d0mine2• 18 years ago

Let us not jump to conclusions:

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=java,+c,+python,+perl,+rub...

http://www.jobstats.co.uk/jobstats.d/Details.d/Trends.d/SKIL...

icey3• 18 years ago

Removing Java and C from your list makes it much easier to see what's going on: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=python%2C+perl%2C+ruby%2C+...

davidw2• 18 years ago

Yeah, the post is based on TIOBE stats. LangPop.com is way better:-) Well, honestly it's still far from perfect, but there's just no way to get really good, clean data for programming language usage throughout the world.

sh1mmer• 18 years ago

How many Perl jobs are turning into Cobol-esque jobs. Maintain a legacy systems and keep it chugging along. How many people build new projects in Perl?

thomasmallen4• 18 years ago

Er...you don't want that. Competition is a good thing.

apgwoz• 18 years ago

Python's competition these days is most likely to be Ruby, not Perl. A fair number of people I know that once programmed in Perl are now Python/Ruby people.

jumper• 18 years ago

I would prefer Python's competition come from something based on a better and presumably newer paradigm, rather than an old tired mess of a language... maybe Perl 5 isn't that, but it sure looks like it to an outsider!

dustineichler• 18 years ago

It's no longer between Python and Perl, it's Ruby now . Perl still has it's place. Personally, i use it everyday, what surprised me more was Delphi. i only know skype company wise that uses it so i dunno.

kingkongrevenge5• 18 years ago

By any purely empirical analysis Ruby practically doesn't exist.

michaelneale4• 18 years ago

Skype uses Delphi?

chorny3• 18 years ago

If you look at TIOBE - they use bad query. Look at http://lui.arbingersys.com/ and http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?usage_statisti... for Perl programming and jobs usage statistics.

sabat3• 18 years ago

I realize this article is a little incendiary but please don't throw logs on the fire. Python isn't for everyone -- only for people who like it when a space has syntactic meaning. ;-)

kragen2• 18 years ago

Today I discovered that % 100 = 3; parses in Perl. I wish the space between the % and the 100 had the semantic meaning of telling perl that the % is supposed to be an operator, not a hash sigil. What other languages allow spaces in identifiers? Fortran 77 and Algol 68, I think?

mnemonicsloth• 18 years ago

Good. Let Python take over the dynamic scripting language space completely.

Who says Python programmers are all jerks?

That they're cold, humorless perfectionists who alienate new and prospective users?

That they have inferiority issues because they're not as popular as they are right?

That they occasionally lapse into self-parody?

schtog2• 18 years ago

Dude chillout I wasn't exactly serious. But I do think that Python deserves the spot as the nr 1 scripting language.

And of course competition is good.

And I don't think the community alienates new users, on the contrary I find it very helpful.

petercooper5• 18 years ago

Some utterly ridiculous FUD about Ruby in there. I can't make Java scale.. but that's not because it can't - just because I don't know Java well at all.

If you're not already good at something, of course it's easy to say something else doesn't work or isn't any good.

scw• 18 years ago

Flatly claiming that Rails can't scale is overstating the case, but their is some truth to it: relative to other frameworks / languages, the effort required to scale Rails is greater than other popular languages.

This has improved with mongrel_cluster and (more recently) Passenger, but the memory footprint for a Rails application continues to be an issue, even relative to other dynamic languages.

petercooper5• 18 years ago

I'm intrigued.. do the efforts to scale Ruby and Perl differ significantly beyond their respective base-line performance?

Interpreter level threads and multi-process based techniques have tended to be common approaches in both various Perl and Ruby projects I've worked with.

staunch4• 18 years ago

It seems like each language only gets to have a one-liner description in everyone's head. Ruby is "can't scale". Perl is "line noise". Python is "clean, but boring" (or something), Java is "verbose and corporate", C++ is "overly complex", Lisp is "for kooks", etc, etc...

silentbicycle3• 18 years ago

In other words, the way programming languages are marketed matters.

staunch4• 18 years ago

I still use Perl to this day because of Catalyst + DBIx::Class + CPAN. I can feel like I can do basically any web development task at least as elegantly, cleanly, and quickly as I could with Ruby or Python. Because of CPAN I think Perl probably wins more often than not on the speed aspect. I also tend to have a lot of backend stuff that runs as daemons/cronjobs, etc. Perl is really great for that stuff.

Perl 5 is obviously on the way out and Ruby/Python are coming in. But they're just passing by each other headed the opposite direction right now. The stigma Perl has just makes it seem worse than it is objectively.

Today Perl 5 is still a very reasonable choice IMHO. I'll switch to Ruby or Python full-time at some point. If Perl 6 ends up being better at some point I'll switch to that. We used to have to choose between C++ and Java and Perl. Perl was so much nicer. Now we have to choose between three languages that are all heaven by comparison. I don't really care which "wins" because I will no matter what.

kingkongrevenge5• 18 years ago

> Perl 5 is obviously on the way out and Ruby/Python are coming in

Tossing aside this obviously flawed TIOBE thingy (Delphi, wtf?) I see no evidence of this. CPAN contributions are accelerating, not flat-lining. Perl's domination over Python and Ruby in the corporate environment continues.

staunch4• 18 years ago

I think you have to be deluding yourself to not recognize this as true. Of course Perl is very far from dead, but the early adopters and influential people are moving away. Don't forget that C++/Java had the corporate environments back when Perl kicked their asses.

sabat3• 18 years ago

And perl6 was DOA. Long live Ruby.

kingkongrevenge5• 18 years ago

Last I checked there are two different Perl 6 implementations on the home stretch.

kragen2• 18 years ago

That race was over four years ago, though. Ruby won. It's nice that the old nag is finally making it to the finish line, but the audience has been gone for a long time.

Tichy8• 18 years ago

I can't take an article serious that lists Visual Basic and Delphi among the top ten programming languages. Maybe they are still very common, but even if they really are, they are definitely not common in the "world" that I am interested in.

ars7• 18 years ago

So if the data doesn't match your expectations change it?

Tichy8• 18 years ago

No, I am just saying that this data lumps totally unrelated fields together.

I would guess that VB is maybe used by Excel users who write little scriplets for their Excel sheets, but rarely by programmers.

It is like saying "PCs and cars are the most popular products in the world", since I am not interested in cars, I simply don't care. I only care about the popularity of PCs. The data is correct, but it is irrelevant to me.

lacker3• 18 years ago

A more reasonable way of putting it would be, what would be really interesting is a breakdown of the languages used by the last 100 successful internet startups, where "successful" is whatever metric you feel like.

run4yourlives3• 18 years ago

Um, VB and Delphi are more popular in the general world. The world you're interested in is but a niche.

Tichy8• 18 years ago

Maybe if you go in sheer user numbers, but it really isn't releveant to me. I will never ever consider to write a web application in Delphi or VB.

Maybe by numbers horses and mules are still the most important means of transport in the world. Doesn't mean that I should worry about buying a horse now.

greyman2• 18 years ago

Wait, but the article didn't make up the numbers, they are just reproducing the rather well-known "TIOBE index". Of course, we can discuss correctness of its methodology, but either way it's not the fault of the article author.

jodrellblank• 18 years ago

If you have to "reinvent the language and the community", how does that count as Perl 5 surviving?

greyman2• 18 years ago

I agree with one redditor who blames perl6 for this state. Indeed, who would start a new project in perl5, when the language becomes obsolete by perl6, but on the other side, you have to wait and wait again for perl6 to be actually delivered.

I think they had to either deliver perl6 a few years ago, or not doing it at all and continue to improve perl5. But in this situation, many people are just not willing to invest into perl and are looking for the greener pastures.

Perl 5 Is Dying

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