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Comment by brokencode | Hacker News Reader

It’s fun to use that quote, but is it actually true? At one time, Perl was extremely popular, and was basically the Python of its era. Now, I barely ever hear about it, and it mainly seems to be used as a cautionary example of what can happen to a language when it goes through a major update.

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Yes, it is actually true. Both Perls have a regular release cycle, and continue to be used in companies around the world. The amount of developers isn't really growing for Perl 5, but it's not really shrinking either. eBay isn't dead just because Amazon and Ali became the dominant players, nor is Perl dead because Python and JS overtook it. The market just got larger.

Also, please try Perl 6. The marketing may be a cautionary example, but the language itself reflects 15 years of polish.

I’m not sure that is the case. I know a lot of Perl developers who jumped ship. Including me.

While I respect that Perl development is still going, I haven’t seen it used by anyone in production for at least 15 years.

We (FastMail) use it in production, and all backend development is in Perl for all the products. Booking.com, cPanel, Craigslist, and ZipRecruiter all have sizable Perl codebases, as do many others.

As a FastMail customer I use Perl then!

You should have skipped cPanel though from that list. That doesn’t build credibility ;)

You probably use it indirectly. It's a fair percentage of the git source tree. It's also used in other places you might not expect, like Proxmox, Bugzilla, SpamAssassin, MRTG, and Gnu Parallel. It's also the main language for booking.com.

If you have to enumerate examples, then it proves the parent's point...

It is more niche than it used to be. I'm not arguing that. However, "haven’t seen it used by anyone in production for at least 15 years" seems exaggerated. That's why I enumerated examples. Assuming they've seen one of the examples in production.

>However, "haven’t seen it used by anyone in production for at least 15 years" seems exaggerated.

I think by that they meant "where I've actually seen" (e.g. c ompanies parent worked, visited, friends have etc), not that in general one can't get 10 or 1000 examples of businesses still using Perl from the whole of the internet.

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