Perl far from dead, more popular than you think

http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/11/06/perl-far-from-dead-more-popular-than-you-think/

by chanux • 17 years ago

47 58 17 years ago

royal.pingdom.com

btilly3• 17 years ago

Most of the examples listed are companies that started with Perl and have never migrated. Of more interest for the future of the language are succeeding current startups done in Perl.

Two that I'm aware of in the Los Angeles area are CampusExplorer and The Rubicon Project.

tonystubblebine• 17 years ago

How many new initiatives use Perl though? There's a lot of legacy code in that list.

brunov• 17 years ago

- http://www.takkle.com/college_recruiting/athletes

- http://duckduckgo.com/

- http://www.yellowbot.com/

- http://osx.iusethis.com/

- http://www.thumb-rate.com/

- http://hiveminder.com/splash/

many more here: http://www.catalystsites.org/

jrockway9• 17 years ago

Perl is what I use for my new initiatives, and it's a choice I've made through careful consideration of many alternatives. Perl has the right "balance" of languages features for web applications.

Some options I've tried and what I didn't like:

Haskell is much faster and a better language in general, but just doesn't have enough usable libraries for writing web applications. (My first Haskell web application was an application that generated an image of the latest Twitter post from a user using a given hashtag. It went together quickly enough, but I didn't really feel like "wow, this was a great web development experience that has changed my life". I do feel that way about Haskell for text processing and system programming, ironically. It definitely beats Perl there. But for simple and complex web applications, Perl is much better.)

CL has the best development tools of any language, so I really wanted to like it, but it doesn't really have a coherent community. I started writing a web application in CL to allow clients to email us files, even when they were behind a firewall that blocked outgoing email and ftp (!). This didn't go too well; I really didn't like cl-who or html-template, and there were no other options. (People in #lisp agreed with me, but their advice was to "just write my own". The answer to every question about libraries on #lisp is "just write your own".) I started porting Template::Refine from Perl to CL (see template-refine and cl-template-refine on my github), so I could generate HTML. closure-xml and cl-stp are great XML libraries, BTW. The next thing I wanted was a dependency-injection framework. There were no libraries for that, so I had to "just write my own". cl-junkie is on my github (junkie, "dependency injection", get it?), but I got bored and didn't finish it. I ended up not needing the app anyway. Too much yak-shaving lets you get over the excitement of your actual idea, and leads to it never being done. With Perl I can get a working application before I am not excited anymore. (Then I get excited about cleaning up the libraries, and do that afterwards. Bootstrapping++)

Moving along, there is Scala and Clojure. Scala is a fine langauge, it really "gets" functional programming. Clojure is not to my liking. (And it's not the parentheses; I have a shit-ton of "production" Emacs Lisp lying around.)

These languages are both cases of the "oh, just write your own libraries" community problem. Even worse is the potential to reuse Java libraries. I don't see the point of using a nice functional language with overly-verbose libraries that are going to randomly throw NullPointerExceptions. Many other problems I have with Java carry over to Scala and Clojure if you use Java libraries. (Design pattern overload, extremely poor object system, no types that cannot be null, etc.)

(I know I said "bootstrapping++" above, and that you can bootstrap clean Scala/Clojure libraries off the messy Java ones. But it's just too painful for me. It's not boring, it's just pure pain.)

I use Scala for Android applications simply because there is absolutely no other option. (I couldn't get any Clojure code to compile, and I am certainly not going to use plain Java. I prefer Scala to both anyway, but obviously I would prefer various non-JVM languages to those.)

So then there are Ruby and Python. Both are basically Perl with very tiny superficial differences, so there is no reason to waste my time becoming good at those. (Similarly, if you are a Ruby guru, you will probably not be too excited to switch to Perl. Same language, except you aren't a guru anymore.) I think Perl's libraries are, in general, more extensive and more mature than Python or Ruby's. But for the beaten path, you will do fine with any. Ruby has this "Rails" thing that I hear is pretty popular.

One thing I've noticed, though, is that the Perl community is better at stealing from Ruby and Python than those communities are at stealing from us. DBIx::Class is significantly more advanced than any Python or Ruby ORM that I know of, KiokuDB is the only sane object database among those three languages, etc., etc. But Ruby and Python still don't have anything close. OTOH, Python's WSGI and Ruby's Rack are great ideas... so the Perl community now has PSGI and Plack. So you can see why I find it compelling to stick with Perl. Good ideas eventually migrate over here, and the community supports them.

Anyway, if I had a point, it's that there is no reason to disqualify Perl from "what should I write my new app in" discussions, except ignorance. Perl has its tradeoffs, but so does anything else available. (Don't let "I last used Perl in 1995, so Perl must still be the same as it was in 1995," ruin your next application development project!)

DanielStraight3• 17 years ago

Ruby and Python are basically Perl with superficial differences? How in the world did you come to that conclusion? I don't think I have ever seen anyone make that argument before.

garnet7• 17 years ago

What do you think of Perl 6 so far?

elblanco3• 17 years ago

>One thing I've noticed, though, is that the Perl community is better at stealing from Ruby and Python than those communities are at stealing from us. DBIx::Class is significantly more advanced than any Python or Ruby ORM that I know of, KiokuDB is the only sane object database among those three languages, etc., etc. But Ruby and Python still don't have anything close. OTOH, Python's WSGI and Ruby's Rack are great ideas... so the Perl community now has PSGI and Plack. So you can see why I find it compelling to stick with Perl. Good ideas eventually migrate over here, and the community supports them.

I upvoted for this. Perl is kind of the "English" of the programming world, picking up whatever useful artifacts from other ideas it can without being concerned over language or design purity. Perl's design concept is to use whatever's best - i.e. be agnostic and be pragmatic.

This has it's good sides and bad sides (just like English). Perl can be both easy to learn the basics of, but very tricky in advanced usage, and it suffers from the "hard to maintain" problem. But it can be a nice dense language that maps well to a reasonably logical thinking process (it's probably by semi-intention since L.Wall is a Linguist).

Perl 5 is certainly showing its age though.

icey2• 17 years ago

This is quite seriously the best advocacy of Perl I have seen in a long, long time.

SwellJoe2• 17 years ago

We had the "What language?" talk when we started work on Cloudmin, as well as when we began planning some web services. Perl ended up on top in both cases. Admittedly, we have a historic codebase of several hundred thousand lines of Perl, but we've both worked in Python at least as much as Perl in the past several years and there is a version of our API in Python that we could have started from. We weren't forced to choose Perl for legacy reasons, but we chose it, anyway.

We're pretty much agnostic about languages; we prefer dynamic languages, but not much beyond that. Our website is running on Drupal and several custom modules in PHP. We'll be adding those afore-mentioned web services via frontend PHP code, but the backend will be Perl. Haskell might make an appearance at some point in the future for concurrency work where performance matters, but for now, Perl is plenty fast and has reasonable concurrency mechanisms for our needs.

So, we're still cranking out tens of thousands of lines of Perl every year, and will be launching a couple of new products in the next six months also written in Perl.

But, I will mention that our products directly and easily support PHP, Ruby on Rails and Django deployments, but not Catalyst. And it's because we're simply not hearing requests for Catalyst from paying customers. Maybe the Catalyst developers are more old-school and don't trust a control panel (even one written in Perl), or maybe there's a helluva a lot more PHP and a handful more Ruby on Rails and Django developers out there (note that PHP developers using our software outnumber RoR and Django developers to a degree that makes the latter two practically noise in the signal). So, realistically, I have to agree. Perl is a niche language for new developments, but then again, so are Python and Ruby.

bobbyi• 17 years ago

Youporn is a top 50 site and was started in 2006.

buster• 17 years ago

Listing very old sites which may have still some perl fragments somewhere in there infrastructure doesn't mean perl isn't dead. I don't know of any major sites written in perl today. Also, i thought slashdot used perl a long time ago but have already written an new system, but i may remember that wrong...

http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/programming-language-jo... has some interesting trends. From what i see there, i'd say perl is probably still alive but slowly dying.

My hopes have been on parrot for perl. But after reading about the new perl version and its ridiculous new "features", i am convinced that perl will die when parrot breaks module compatibility with cpan, because noone will port modules, yet care for the new perl.

chromatic4• 17 years ago

> I don't know of any major sites written in perl today.

Did you read the linked article?

> i am convinced that perl will die when parrot breaks module compatibility with cpan, because noone will port modules, yet care for the new perl.

Look into projects such as Plumage, Blizkost, and Perl 6 proto.

showerst• 17 years ago

There are millions (billions?) of lines of COBOL still out there too.

I can think of two strong arguments against picking a less-discussed (dying?) language:

1) Anecdotally, the top 1% of programmers (the people you really want to work with) will go to the tools that make them the most productive. The reason there's so much hype around languages like Ruby is that it makes programmers feel more productive and happier. The kind of programmers that go online and talk about these things after hours and argue about minor semantics are the passionate ones, and the most likely ones to rock from 9-5.

A 2% increase in productivity matters to a programmer that already gets twice as much done as an average code-monkey.

2) One also has to look at what languages are being learned by new coders. Code today might need to be maintained in 5, 10, or 20 years (let's hope not...). If Perl coders are sparse now, what happens when you need to hire a contractor at 2am in 10 years? You don't want to pay for one with an obscure skill-set.

I'm a firm believer in choosing the best tool for the job, and not jumping on the 'newest thing' every time a new blub gets an endorsement from this year's DHH, but; ceteris paribus, I'd pick a language that's gaining momentum in the world, not losing it.

pshangov• 17 years ago

1) The top 1% of programmers will indeed go to the tools that make them the most productive, which are not necessarily the tools that happen to be currently most fashionable with the youngsters. Claims that Ruby is more productive than Perl are vaporware. Ruby did have an advantage for a while, but now Catalyst, RoR, and Django have now very similar feature sets (only you get CPAN as a bonus with Perl).

2) A language that is currently gaining momentum is not necessarily a language that will still have that momentum in 5, 10, or 20 years time. Perl popularity reached its peak years ago, then slowed down and has now settled and remained constant for a number of years. Given the kinds of mission critical applications that have been written and are still being written in Perl, with all my respect for Ruby (which I think is a fantastic language) I think it is a safe bet that in 20 years' time there will still be more Perl programmers than there will be Ruby programmers.

SwellJoe2• 17 years ago

I think it is a safe bet that JavaScript (or whatever it becomes) will be more popular than Ruby, Python, PHP and Perl combined in 20 years time. And I think it will be popular on both the server-side and client-side.

But, making bets about technology 20 years out is a risky game. 20 years ago, there was no Java (and now it has come and gone as The Next Big Thing), JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, or Python. Perl was just getting started and Haskell was mostly just a gleam in some academic's eye. All of those techs are still on upward trajectories to varying degrees, and some rose faster than others, and some (Haskell, for example) have only recently started to see a burst of activity and interest.

In other words, I don't actually have any idea what's going to happen in languages, but I suspect that in 20 years, it probably won't be recognizable as anything we're using today. Because the languages most used today for new projects did not exist 20 years ago. But, I do have a lot of reasons for believing that JavaScript will slowly, but inevitably, become a dominant language for new applications on the server-side, just as it has become the dominant language on the client-side for new applications.

berntb2• 17 years ago

Oh, please...

Perl, Python and Ruby are quite similar scripting languages -- same paradigm, very similar niches. Modern Perl today is arguably in a good position for productivity (see Moose, CPAN, Best Practices book, Perl 6 getting ready for publishing, etc).

The reason we see the flame wars and hype seems to be competition; these languages fill the same niche.

Ruby looks quite nice and Python seems usable. But personally, I find the hype and language war mentality you see every time Perl etc are mentioned as distasteful. I would be embarrassed to be identified with that.

Edit: jrockway already did a good job of beating this horse to death, it seems.

jhannah• 17 years ago

http://www.catalystsites.org/

jsrfded• 17 years ago

At blekko we're building a web-scale search engine in perl. It includes a distributed platform (kind of like bigtable) currently running on ~200 machines (soon to be 700). The total datastore, containing several n-billion page crawls and associated indexes on our cluster is about 350tb.

I think of perl as a replacement for C. We're using it as a system language, doing things like running epoll event loops, sending/receiving udp packets, mmapping files, etc.

IMO perl, python and ruby are all great choices for a project. Perl seems to be unfashionable these days, but we picked it because it came out the fastest on the benchmarks for what we're doing, and being the oldest is has some of the deepest library support through CPAN. The pragmatic-vs-idealistic attitude of the community is also a plus for us.

Freebytes3• 17 years ago

I have seen Perl slurp and parse a 200MB text file in seconds. (It is really a remarkable language for practical extraction and reports after all.) I have also used it for its search capabilities. If PHP did not have preg functions (Perl Compatible Regex), I would not be using PHP. Perl is known for its speed. My only concerns with Perl stem from my inability to develop applications quickly with the language, but that is due more to my inexperience with it. However, after using it for years, you would think I would know everything there is to know about it.

n8agrin• 17 years ago

Oh come on. Why is it that every 3 months there is a new article defending Perl's vitality? I don't hear many people claiming Perl is dead. Does anyone who likes and uses Perl care, and I mean really care, if Perl maybe be deemed "dead" by non-Perl users? I understand public perception is important and a growing active community is important. All that's well and good, but as a non-Perl user I've never had anything but the impression that the Perl community is alive and well. If people started telling me Python is dead I would probably ask them if they meant their pet snake, and then I'd get right back to writing all my double underscore methods happily. I certainly wouldn't write blog posts claiming Python is not dead. Maybe this is just my take but it seems like constantly claiming Perl isn't dead sure is a good way to push the language in that direction.

joe_the_user• 17 years ago

Actually,

I think you answer your own question here. Perl seems dead because the Perl articles have titles like "Perl's Not Dead". If a language's supporters have to argue for its very existence, the language can't be doing very well. And with many languages very visibly growing, not being dead isn't enough, if a language isn't growing, it can easily seem dead.

An article like "Why Is Everyone Excited By Perlfoo, The Latest Perl Library That's Transforming The World" would actually be a better argument that Perl had life in it.

berntb2• 17 years ago

>>Why is it that every 3 months there is a new article defending Perl's vitality?

You don't think a defensive attitude might have something to do with finding "Perl is dead/unreadable" trolls every time it is mentioned on the net? Including on HN.

Freebytes3• 17 years ago

I loved Perl, and I still use it for quick hacks, but there are multiple types of languages for different tasks. One of the tasks is to create a client side application as an enterprise solution. Perl is not necessarily best suited for this even if people try to make it so. The next is for web development. I originally started with Perl for this, but PHP came along and made things so much easier. Using Perl before PHP resulted in me knowing PHP the same day I started using it. The general concepts were already there. However, PHP is ugly in the way that the attributes to functions are inconsistent. I still use PHP for web development, but for my next project, I am going to take a look at a higher level language based on Ruby. Ruby looks very easy. While I enjoy complexity in programming, I enjoy productivity during the creation process just as much and products such as Rails look like they are the next step in such development. Lastly, there is the quick hack. I still grab Perl for such solutions, but this is code I would never show anyone else. So, yes, Perl is not dead for me and maybe never will be, but it has had one foot in the grave for a while. Perhaps a web development kit on top of an existing Perl architecture to better separate the HTML, data, and functions would be the cure, but it may be too late for that.

adam-_-• 17 years ago

Have you looked at Catalyst?!

Freebytes3• 17 years ago

No, but I am going to look at it now. Now I am interested in taking a look since Perl needs a web framework that is better than the standard CPAN stuff.

flatline• 17 years ago

"A new version, Perl 6, is on its way but still under development."

Terrible article, it ignores so many of the issues that have directly led to Perl's downturn in popularity and just hand-waves that Perl is still alive and kicking. The phantom of Perl 6 has been a weight around the community's neck for years, and the incremental 5.x releases with unrealized promises of 6 have probably driven away many developers to newer, sexier languages, that can deliver a major release in under a decade.

chromatic4• 17 years ago

> ... newer, sexier languages, that can deliver a major release in under a decade.

Did you know that Guido switched jobs in spring 2000 (not a typo) to work, in part, on Python 3000? Python 3 is older than Perl 6, and it's a much less modest project. Compare Perl 6 rules and grammars to anything Python 3000 invented, for example.

donaldc• 17 years ago

To be fair, python 3 now has a complete, usable implementation, whereas perl 6 does not.

That said, I very much like what I've seen/heard of perl 6, and will certainly learn it once it's production-ready.

jbellis• 17 years ago

So you're saying choosing realistic goals is _bad_?

cameldrv• 17 years ago

Py3k has been in the planning stages since 2000, but that doesn't really capture the differences in development between Perl and Python over that time period. Python 2.0 was referred to as Python 2000, and so the next logical step was Python 3000, which was planned to be a backwards incompatible release. In the meantime, Python made seven major 2.x releases, adding a ton of features, such as:

1. New Style Classes 2. Closures 3. List Comprehensions 4. Generators 5. Decorators 6. The With Statement

Those are just the big ones -- there are a lot of other changes as well as tons of library improvements.

icey2• 17 years ago

I know that this is incorrect, but the promise of Perl 6 has kept me away from Perl for years. I haven't touched a line of Perl since 1995, and I keep wanting to pick it back up; but then my inner curmudgeon reminds me that Perl 6 is coming "Real Soon Now" and I move on to something else. I'm sure I can't be the only one who does this.

Again, I know that this isn't a valid argument, but it's enough for me to focus on other languages when I'm toying around with ideas.

makecheck• 17 years ago

They ought to look at a lot more than web sites (although I've written plenty of Perl CGI, and can understand why people would still use Perl).

Perl 5 is used extensively to automate tasks at companies; for example, in the semiconductor industry. I've found that most of the engineers working in design are basically fluent in Perl, and choose it for anything serious. I've also seen TCL used, but that's mostly because so many tools support only TCL APIs. Python has caught on in some places, but it is still mostly appealing to pure software developers.

mx12• 17 years ago

There are definitely areas where Perl is still alive. I work in a bioinformatics lab and we use Perl for the majority the analysis software we write. Mostly because of Perl's strengths of handling files compared to languages like Java.

Jeema3000• 17 years ago

Job openings on Indeed.com by keyword:

Ruby: 5,978 Python: 9,802 Perl: 22,172

If Perl is dead, then what are Ruby and Python...

jrockway9• 17 years ago

People like to look at rates of change, or if that isn't favorable to their argument, the rate of the rate of change. With enough operations that remove the "+ c" term, you can win any argument.

This results in:

"The total number of people that have ever used Ruby is greater than the rate of people switching to Perl."

"Clearly Perl is dead!! My decision to use Ruby is justified with mathematical fact!"

jrockway9• 17 years ago

I meant to add; there is nothing wrong with using Ruby. You do not need mathematical proof that it is better. If you use it and it makes you happy, that is all the "reason" you need.

It would be amusing if people argued over colors and ice cream flavors in the way they argue over programming languages. "Chocolate is dead!"

elblanco3• 17 years ago

Perl is one of those "expected" utility languages everybody (developers) should have some familiarity with. I don't think it's generally considered for app development. But if somebody needs to do some quick, 1-off data processing, a person that knows a bit of Perl can knock it off in a small fraction of the time as somebody that doesn't.

I have a hard time hiring developers that don't know at least a smattering of the Rubbish Lister.

joblessjunkie• 17 years ago

Ohloh tracks source control activity for open source projects.

They show a steady decline in Perl activity over the last decade:

https://www.ohloh.net/languages/compare?measure=projects&...

jonathansizz• 17 years ago

Let's see the 'decline' in Perl jobs over the last five years:

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2C+php%2C+python%2C+r...

jrockway9• 17 years ago

I spend my time writing code (or watching TV, or whatever) rather than maintaining Ohloh stats for each of my 100+ open-source Perl modules. Most other people I know do the same.

Perl is the 5th most popular programming language on github (in terms of unique non-fork projects that contain some code in that language). It is ahead of Java and PHP, for example.

fireartist• 17 years ago

That shows "percentage of total" going down - if you click the "values" link, you'll see the actaul numbers steadily rising. Lies, damned lies, and statistics...

Perl far from dead, more popular than you think

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