hi, i was interested if perl is still relevant in this day and age. Perl has been on the decline for a very long time now. Perl 6 (now named 'raku) not being backwards compatible with perl 5 code made the already small perl community even smaller by splitting it in half. A good example is lisp with it’s thousands of different dialects.
Is it still worth using or is it bound to legacy software forever? Like cobol.
Perl hasn’t lost any of it’s qualities or relevance or usefulness.
It’s just, with these incompatible language upgrades, they are creating artificial barriers for starters and for occasional users. The outcome is that they are making it less popular, sadly.
Its qualities*
Is Raku really used as much as perl? Splitting the community in half is quite the claim…
I know of at least one big online company that still has a staggering amount of perl in their stack for 2023 (IMO)
I still use Perl for most things – it’s my go-to language when I have to get something done quickly. And quickly doesn’t have to mean small one-liner scripts.
My biggest reason for using it is that mod_perl is still blazingly fast.
Its* thousands of different dialects.