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Comment by leejo | Hacker News Reader

I don't disagree with anything you've said either, in fact I've blogged about this at length: http://leejo.github.io/2017/12/17/tpc_and_the_end_of_languag...

My main issue is that "People still use Perl?" has essentially become a meme at this point. I'm relatively sure that any sufficiently commented on or upvoted thread on HN gets that statement in it somewhere.

Yes, Perl is still used. Extensively. People and companies just don't talk about it. That's the problem with Perl these days.

(Personally I think TAP and CPAN were Perl's greatest contributions, as I was never a heavy user of regexp).

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> People and companies just don't talk about it.

Why not?

Last company used Perl but we didn't talk about it because it was all frozen. If anyone ever considered touching it for more than 2 hours, it was likely to get rewritten into Python/Powershell. Last perl thing I had touched, entire repo hadn't seen a commit for 4 years until mine.

> Why not?

I don't know. I could speculate:

  * The Perl they have is so low maintenance they don't think about it much
  * Or they're planning to rewrite it but haven't yet got around to it... after more than a decade?
  * They have nobody working on it that is vocal about it or active in the community/blogsphere/etc
  * The company policy is to not talk about it
  * Or talk about any tech they use - think: banks, large enterprise, fintech
  * Or they're successful enough they don't feel the need to talk about it
  * They're open source tools or distros that have a mass of other tech so Perl gets ignored even though its practically embedded - Linux distros, git, etc
  * The Perl is on the periphery, or not the core logic - test suites (memcached for example), used in build systems, pipelines, Make, oneliners, etc

There's an argument to be had that Perl's strong backwards compatibility has meant it has sat there working in the background for years (decades in some cases). And, as most of us know, when tech "just works" it doesn't get talked about.

I think that all makes sense. I would perhaps as an outside observer also lay the blame at Perl's feet - with Perl 6 the momentum seemed to crash completely over a decade or so.

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