What Killed Perl?

The backwards incompatibility of Perl 6 absolutely killed Perl.

There are many languages still in use today that have all kinds of warts and ugliness, but they remain in use because they still have momentum and lots of legacy things built in them. So being ugly or old isn’t enough of a factor for people to abandon something in droves.

Once you need to rewrite everything, there’s no reason to stay with something you know since you need to fully retool anyway.

As a Perl programmer since v5 was released, the confusion around 6 completely destroyed almost everyone’s enthusiasm, and immediately caused all new projects to avoid Perl. It seemed like 5 had reached the end of the line, and 6 was nowhere to be found. Nobody wants to gamble so many hours of their lives, and the future of their business, on such an uncertain environment.

If Perl 6 had any visible movement within the first few years, it might have survived, but it was a good decade before they even admitted Perl 6 might take longer than expected, and then more time after that before they admitted it should have been a new language. 6 was interesting for language geeks, and they probably did some cool things, but you can’t run a large popular project like it’s a small research project. That completely destroyed all momentum in the community. Perl 5 development only resumed far too late, after the writing was already on the wall.

Both Bill Gates and Linus understand backwards compatibility as a sacrosanct principle. Python only just barely survived the jump from 2 to 3. JavaScript can only survive this because there’s no other option in a browser.

As a very long-time Perl developer and FOSS contributor, I think this blog post is incorrect about whether Perl 6/Raku was a factor in Perl's decline. I think Perl 6/Raku did a few things that hurt Perl 5:

1. It pulled away folks who would otherwise have spent time improving Perl 5 (either the core or via modules).

2. It discouraged significant changes to the Perl 5 language, since many people figured that it wasn't worth it with Perl 6 just around the corner.

3. It confused CTO/VP Eng types, some of whom thought that they shouldn't invest in Perl 5, since Perl 6 was coming soon. I've heard multiple people in the Perl community discuss hearing this directly from execs.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

Also, even if Perl 6 had never happened the way it did and instead we'd just had smaller evolutions of the language in major versions, I think usage would still have shrunk over time.

A lot of people just dislike Perl's weird syntax and behavior. Many of those people were in a position to teach undergrads, and they chose to use Python and Java.

And other languages have improved a lot or been created in the past 20+ years. Java has gotten way better, as has Python. JavaScript went from "terribly browser-only language" to "much less terrible run anywhere language" with a huge ecosystem. And Go came along and provided an aggressively mediocre but very usable strongly typed language with super-fast builds and easy deploys.

Edit: Also PHP was a huge factor in displacing Perl for the quick and dirty web app on hosted services. It was super easy to deploy and ran way faster than Perl without mod_perl. Using mod_perl generally wasn't possible on shared hosting, which was very common back in the days before everyone got their own VM.

All of those things would still have eaten some of Perl's lunch.

Python and Ruby killed Perl.

Before Perl, there was no scripting language that could do systems tasks except maybe shell and tcl, but that's shell is an extremely unpleasant programming experience and the performance is horrid, and tcl's string-based nature is just too weird.

Perl gives you something more like a real programming language and can do shell-like tasks and systems tasks very nicely. Compared to what came before, it is amazing.

But then Ruby and Python came along and checked the "real programming language" box even more firmly than Perl while retaining the shell/systems angle. Ruby and Python were better than Perl along exactly the same axis as the one on which Perl was better than Tcl and shell.

Python killed Perl.

By the time Perl 6 was around, Perl's lunch was already eaten by Python. Only a few table scraps left. Perl 6 would have had to be a better Perl 5 and a better Python 2 to win.

Python came with better batteries and better syntax. It allowed producing code you could read and understand a week later. Perl I found was a write-only language for me. I went back looking at my old Perl code and I couldn't decipher it without some effort.

And Python became popular not just because it was a better Perl, but it attracted folks who used Java and C++. CPU speeds were getting fast enough that you could actually do file and network IO at acceptable speeds without all the `public static void main(String[] args)` and `System.out.println(...)` boilerplate, but still had all the object oriented bits like inheritance and composition with which you could go crazy with if you wanted.

To me Perl was just Weird, to no particular end. Not the kind of mind expanding Haskell/Prolog/Lisp weirdness that opens up new possibilities. It just does roughly the same things as every other language, but everything is done slightly differently due to evolving out of the primordial soup of bourne shell and AWK filtered through Larry Wall's brain.

Perl and Python were similarly powerful and useful languages, but I could learn and start producing useful code in Python after reading an hour long tutorial. Perl took an order of magnitude longer, and remained more awkward to use just due to the Weirdness. There was a momentum building in the early 2000s toward competitors like Python and Ruby that were seen as less crufty and more modern.

Perl's developers seemed to agree, since they cooked up their own competitor to Perl, an entirely different language confusingly called Perl 6. The coexistence of Perl 5 and 6 made the Python 3 transition look like a cakewalk -- at least it would have save for Perl 6's almost entire failure to exist for over a decade after its inception. It produced lots of constantly churning specs and blog posts about register based virtual machines with native support for continuations or whatever, but no implementation of a language that anyone felt comfortable using for any real development. Meanwhile people kept using the ossifying Perl 5 for existing applications, and gradually transitioning away as they were replaced.

Also PHP overtook it for the "just FTP a script to $5 shared hosting and make a webapp" use case.

Perl "died" through a 1,2,3 knockout of

1. failing to have a coherent path to Perl 6

2. Ruby (on Rails) taking over the workhorse task of serving up dynamic content that Perl had owned before then

3. Python completely dominating the utilitarian scripting/programming world in nearly every niche

Why did this happen? I was a work-a-day developer working in Perl v5 when this transition occurred and from my perspective and recollection v6's meandering development cycle -- which didn't really address the issues of the broader Perl community was the primary choice. Perl 6 was developed in a way that didn't address the broad concerns of the Perl community, and expected people to make a wholesale switch to what was effectively an entirely new language anyways. It forced people to go out looking and what they found were either stronger solutions to specific domains (Ruby on Rails) or a nicer language than what was being proposed (Python).

Where Python really excelled at the time was that it looked and worked very much like the pseudocode that was going around at the time, and had an opinion about how you should write your code. Perl is wonderful to write in, but in many ways is too expressive and permissive and it resulted in an ungodly mess that could be hard to maintain. Perl 6 simply leaned into that problem rather than encouraging a cleaner approach.

I never liked Python much, but damn if I couldn't argue that I was much more productive with it than Perl in the end. Which was weird because when I was really hacking in Perl I could write code almost as fast as I could think giving a kind of illusion of productivity. But Python was easier to integrate into a coherent team development structure and actual productivity is more important than feels.

I miss working in Perl. But I knew it was really finally dead when I was giving tutorial classes to new bioinformaticists who were being given old Perl codebases to update and they were getting through school without learning the language.

There's more than one thing that "killed perl" (I still use it almost every day.)

But I think the main thing that made it long term non competitive were a series of bad design choices all the way back to perl 4 or even 1.

Namely:

- the need for sigils

- weird sigil rules where the 0 element of @x is $x[0] not @x[0]

- auto flattening, ex. (@a, @b), and hence the need for manual reference management, as in (\@a, [1,2,3])

- lack of a native object system, and widespread repurposing of hashrefs as objects, with awkward field syntax $x->{foo}

- awkward function argument syntax: my ($x, $y) = @_;

These things add up, and both JS and python showed that all those can be done much more smoothly.

Another thing that counted at the time, is that PHP came out with a slightly worse language, but a super beginner-friendly approach to html templating and request lifecycle: you can just mix php and html in the same file, and the entire runtime environment is nuked at each request. The result was that php replaced perl for an entire generation of web devs in the early 2000s.

My hypothesis is that as the volume of Perl grew, it became more and more apparent that it wasn't a good idea to write new projects in Perl:

- Perl's fascination with punctuation makes it hard to google for stuff, since search engines strip punctuation. In an era of RTFM and grep, maybe this is okay, but puts the language at a substantial disadvantage vs languages that use more prose than punctuation

- The distinction between scalar vs array context is subtle and feels somewhat pointless if you learned a language like C or JavaScript first. C has no overloads but manages to work fine, and other scripting languages like JS or Python let you branch on the runtime type of variables explicitly. Why bother with array context?

- Similarly, people got used to having named function arguments in their function signatures. Maybe in an era where most code was either compiled (and had named function args), or was stringly-typed and scripting like Bash, Perl feels like more of the same. But once we started getting decent scripting languages that had named function args, it became a real pain to repeat basic stuff like "assign parameter 1 to variable $name, assign parameter 2 to variable $age" in every function. I wish shells would bite the bullet and figure out a way to adopt them.

Overall, our industry is moving towards larger scale and complexity, and at larger scales, reading and maintaining code is more important than writing code. Perl's language design choices are all balanced for 1-10 unix wizard authors having fun writing small scale scripts. Compare it to Java, the Anti-Perl: today scripting languages like Python, JavaScript are getting closer to Java or ML with compile-time type checkers and sophisticated type systems. Few new or existing languages are getting similar to Perl.

I don't think Perl 6 had anything to do with it. I wrote a lot of Perl5 in college, and didn't particularly want to write any more Perl5, or adopt Perl6.

To get Perl to work with apache (the most used web server for a time), there were two options: the not-so-complicated cgi script which gets executed from scratch on every request, then there was mod_perl which required a lot of tinkering with apache configurations and writing your code in a different way.

Even with those two options, you can't just write some code in a page and execute it without some sort of itermediate code.

Thats why php became so popular, perl coders could pick it up in a day ($ and all) and all you have to do is write .php files to a server - with the bonus that you have a rudimentary templating system built-in to php.

There really isn't much more to it than that.

Already in the very early millennium, jokes like “Perl is an explosion in an ASCII factory” were going around the computer-nerd community, while several publishers were putting out affordable and fun and engaging books to learn Python. No surprise that Perl quickly declined in popularity for scripting. It has been amusing to watch the continual waves of reawakened interest in awk, while Perl seems to remain perennially marginalized now.

It's been discussed before, but Python just seemed more straightforward to a lot of people. It had a built-in object oriented model as well when that was the rage instead of the weak default one and dozen modules on CPAN to do object oriented programming. There was generally one way to do something and that was easier to learn than TIMTOWTDI.

Perl died because the other languages are better. IMO, Perl was a quick solution to a need; but it has since been eclipsed by modern languages.

I was in college 1999-2003, I did PHP in an internship, and then later did some Perl in one of my classes.

Perl (in my college class) was so incomprehensible that I decided that I would avoid it. I've never applied to a job that uses Perl, and never responded to a recruiter that was looking for a Perl engineer. I've never had to use it at work, and fortunately I've never worked with anyone who wanted to use it.

I think it's best to think of Perl as a transition technology.

My experience of working with Perl as a primary language from late 90s to today: Perl was dead long before Perl 6/Raku was a real thing. By the time that happened it had already lost massive ground to PHP, Python, Java, etc.

PHP had replaced CGI as the easiest way to get code on a webserver, Python and Java were easier to read and understand, easier to structure large systems with, and generally easier to use. Ruby came along and MVC frameworks became the thing for complex web platforms.

Meanwhile Perl was sorta keeping up, the "Modern Perl" movement helped dispel myths about "write only" code, things like Moose, DBIC, Catalyst, Mojolicious, etc meant you could write pretty modern stuff with it. But the community was smaller, fractured by Perl 6 and dominated by some ahem divisive characters which made it intimidating for newcomers, and it just slowly died from there.

By the time Stack Overflow came along it was easy to see that other languages had vibrant communities surrounding them and for me it never really recovered.

I learned and used Perl professionally from around 2005-2015 and experienced first-hand the ossification, fear of change, and lack of innovation in Perl 5 development. It seems all the talent and effort started being wasted on making Perl 6 the bestest, most elegant, most useful programming language in the world. Just seeing the neglect of Perl 5 kept me from ever considering Perl 6 and motivated me to move to other languages.

Back in the day it was Perl or PHP on the web

I was a Perl programmer, and I looked down my nose at PHP. Silly me, then and now

Why did PHP, an objectively a worse language, win?

Rasmus Lerdorf said in a quote I can no longer find, it was modperl vs. modphp for Apache.

Modperl was, typically for Perl, very comprehensive and allowed access to all the Apache processing hooks

Modphp was, typically for PHP, just enough to speed up rendering so only allowed access to the barest minimal set of hooks

Modperl, so much better (I can hear myself say 30 years ago)

But at the time most websites, by count not by traffic, ran on shared hosts where the system administrator gave you access to software. If they installed mosdperl you would be able to intercept, read, and change traffic for all websites hosted on that machine

Modphp, not so.

So PHP was widely available to the pioneers in the day, people scratching together a little web hosting business and growing . Perl was not

Not enough on its own to kill Perl, but an important nail in its coffin

In all seriousness mod_php killed Perl, or at least struck the fatal blow. In the late 90s I wanted to make dynamic web content, just simple CRUD stuff. The most reliable way to do this was Perl. As long as your hash bang and permissions were correct you could drop a script in a cgi-bin directory and it would work. It didn't matter if the server was Solaris, Linux, or some other Unix. Most hosts that supported Perl also at least had the CGI module installed as well.

It was worth fighting with Perl's syntax because it was the best option for web programming (for random amateurs like myself). Web hosts often didn't have C compilers available so C wasn't an option. TCL was workable but not as prevalent as Perl on web hosts. Same with PHP3. Keep in mind this was an era where you were deploying on machines you didn't on which you didn't have admin access. Most of the time you didn't have shell access on machines you'd deploy on.

As Linux adoption on servers exploded so did the deployment of PHP. It was easy to deploy PHP web apps since they could be readily dropped in your htdocs or public_html directory and be handled by the server. Enabling other CGI outside cgi-bin directories was uncommon.

So by 2000 or so there was no reason to learn Perl to do web stuff easily. You could do it in PHP which was already a templating language. The younger version of me that wanted to do web CRUD stuff bought a PHP book instead of a Perl book. With Python 2's release at that same time if you wanted to do portable non-web stuff you had a much nicer language than Perl available as well.

I think it is due to the fact that Perl has some confusing bits like those variable prefixes ($@%), the lack of function arguments (I know that this has changed recently), not really great error handling, etc and so people started using languages which seemed easier to use like Python.

What killed Perl for me was readability, long before Perl 6/Raku. I was an Awk programmer from way back, so took to Perl quickly once it was available. Then in the late 90's I wrote a utility program in Perl that generated some nice HTML documentation for me from some kind of input format I no longer recall.

A year later I tried to use that script on another project, but had to make some changes; and couldn't make heads or tails of it. Shortly thereafter I had occasion to look at some Tcl/Tk I'd written at about the same time...and it made perfect sense to me.

Had I used Perl on a daily basis, rather than occasionally, I might have stuck with it. Instead I switched to Tcl/Tk, and never regretted it.

Even before the Perl 6 insanity dropped, there was a serious underlying problem in the Perl ecosystem: CPAN. There was this module (I don't remember its name, or author) that was pretty important: you'd end up using it if you were serious about Perl.

One day, around 2000 or so, the author/maintainer, a well-known guy in the Perl community, updated the package with an incompatible API. If you used that package, you had to update your code. There was no backward compatibility, nothing. To make things worse, the README stated that it would AGAIN change API in the future, but he didn't know yet what the change would be.

I considered this disastrous maintainer behavior, as I'm sure anyone reasonable would. It was clear I had to stop using this package, and anything else this guy could get his claws on. But there really wasn't a massive outcry that I could see, nobody calling him out for this crap.

That's when I knew I had to stop writing code in Perl. I tried Ruby but found it unstable at that time. Next project I used Python, and never looked back.

About a dozen years ago, I noticed that the young all seemed to know Python, and did not seem to know Perl. Given that they would be maintaining such code as I wrote and was worth keeping around, I moved to writing in Python. Now when I write Perl, I do silly things like forget semicolons.

Perl can be very well written. I deeply regret not encountering Perl Best Practices when it came out.

I haven't written perl in a long time but I cannot put a finger on why I stopped using it.

It used to be my goto language for quick and dirty scripts that needed somewhat non-trivial text processing.

Anyway, this made me think of the 2008 Damian Connway Perlcon keynote:

    "Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming in Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces... Made Easy"

If you've never seen it it's worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzTjPx4NIiM

Personally, back when Perl 6 was harmless vaporware, I never found a place for Perl 5.

For moderately advanced text processing with regular expressions, supposedly its strong point, it was far less elegant and concise than AWK at the low end and far less readable and less batteries-included than Python for more complex tasks involving some integration.

For dynamic web pages, another of the main uses of Perl, PHP was purposefully designed and (while not really good) practical and user-friendly, with plenty of other obviously more robust and serious options (Ruby, Java, later Python, etc.) for more enterprise projects.

Perl is powerful, expressive, and cryptic. Its popularity faded during a time when the popular trend of programming languages was towards simplicity and legibility. C++ gave way to Java and C#.

Also, Perl's strength was text processing in a world where data was moving out of simple columnar text formats and into databases, xml, json, and other formats better represented by object models than lines of text.

I still use perl. It's my go to for string parsing (think pipe log file, do something with it and send it to stdout). It's also my go to for anything that I still want to work in 10 years.

After twenty years of Perl, I switched to Python because I was encountering too many useful frameworks and systems that had no corresponding Perl packages. The last straw was when I wanted to use Mongo and found that the Perl package was unsupported.

I have two programming language tattoos: A Perl camel, and a Ruby ruby.

For me, that's the answer to this question: Ruby had all the stuff I liked from Perl, and didn't have the stuff I didn't like. It's just that simple.

Shhhh don't mention Perl. The fact that Perl is still installed by default on most Linux distros is the only ray of light in the horrible devops landscape. The fact that I can write a script in Perl and not have to deal with BASH's horrible syntax is a small joy in that world. If you mention Perl too much, the people who ruin everything might set their sights on it.

I think what killed Perl is that no one wants to invest into it. And not because of Perl 6.

It is a great language for quick and dirty scripts, one liners... But no one wants to start a big project in Perl, and I think for good reasons. With only the "quick and dirty" use case remaining, people didn't want to invest into a language for that, it is throwaway, that's the point. So it was left to die slowly.

I don't think that Perl 6 took away the Perl community, I don't think the people on Perl 5 and the ones on Perl 6 were of same kind, the former just wanted to continue using their "Swiss Army Chainsaw", while the latter wanted to design an innovative language. It has created some confusion, but I believe it is minor.

If I want to point at one thing that killed Perl, I would go with PHP. Websites were a common use case for bigger Perl projects. Now that PHP does it better, what's the point of Perl for that application?

I still use Perl everyday. I know it isn't as popular as when I learned it in the 1990's but I process so many text logs that I find it very useful.

It was never about Perl, it was the plethora of alternatives.

Python evolved, PHP had 1000 times more "how to get started" articles, Node happened. And LAMP became the default for noobs.

I learned Perl back in the day. It was fun and powerful.

But I think the package management and culture killed it for me. People took pride is writing obnoxiously messy code. Package dependency hell. Gung ho borderline toxic RTFM culture.

What is dead may never die. Perl will live on in the few mostly weird places doing things other languages can only dream of. And that’s fine. Perl doesn’t need to win the race or update itself. It is good enough as it is. It’s the magic wand in the world full of electronics. Sure you can light the room with an electric PHP/Python lightbulb script. But Perl can summon a levitating glowing orb out of thin air with a single line of code.

From a recruiter’s perspective, I remember recruiting full stack Perl people for a San Jose based tech company in 2010. I was able to secure one really good Perl guy who had just been laid off from Yahoo, but there just wasn’t anyone else who was relatively easy to find with the experience this company wanted. I was charging by the hour, and I distinctly remember suggesting that the company consider hiring non-Perl people and letting them learn on the job as I wasn’t going to be able to find what they wanted. They kept looking for Perl people and I kept charging them. I wasn’t shocked when an executive at the company eventually asked why the recruiting bill was so high given the lack of results.

I have great love for Perl, but I'm not super eager to go back to using it.

I used it in probably one of the more cursed contexts I've ever heard of. Understand[0] is a static analyzer for many languages, and one of its killer features is that it is programmable with a Perl API. I used this feature at a defense consulting job to help target audits of huge, multi-million LOC codebases.

Perl's expressivity was very useful here. I cut my teeth on functional programming concepts to write some very nice traversals. The runtime environment of the host program was a nightmare to deal with though.

[0]: https://scitools.com/

Perl didn't die. It transformed to Raku.

This is evolution. Not death. It found what are its strengths that would make it relevant today and it made the leap of faith. That is remarkable.

No one need to switch to Perls 6 and Perl 5 can evolve incorporating incrementally stuff from Perl 6. Not every core team has the time, the $$$ or the devs to put forward long term plans of compatibility.

People always expect "someone" to do it.

What Perl 5 people could do, is improve its code base, clean it up and use sane software engineering practices to make code boring, modern and much more friendly for contributions.

You know, the anthropic side of software.

Perl 5.

Perl 4 was a great upgrade to bash as a scripting language. Perl 5 added a bunch of complexity to remake Perl into a programming language. It failed.

Perl 4 was a great scripting language whereas Perl 5 was a terrible programing language. Perl 5 lost to the better (dynamic) programming languages and bash reclaimed the scripting title as Perl 4 was dead.

I use shell, vim, sed all the time (awk less but i have used it). I've never used perl. I don't even know if i've ever even encountered a perl program that i wanted to look inside.

I think its just one of those things, they lost mindshare and people stopped making stuff in perl. Network effects made it snowball from there. How often do you see code examples written in perl? Almost never. I see people write blogs with code snippets in python, c, rust or even shell all the time. Never perl.

Momentum matters and perl lost it. I think of perl the same way i think of cobol or fortran.

Nobody we've hired in the last 10 years wants to touch anything Perl.

That said, we re-wrote all of our monitoring scripts in....Bash.

Ugh.

I love Perl. I think, though, that the crazy mix of sigils and braces/brackets to work with complex data structures was one of the main reasons.

Especially for the type of users were Perl had gained some ground in the past...data science, DNA related stuff, etc. Non programmers.

If you look at just about any other language and how you would pull data in and out of json yaml, manipulate individual elements, etc... the Perl is just hard to decipher if you don't have immediate recall of all the crazy syntax for dereferencing things.

It killed itself. I always remember the joke about any random sequence of characters and numbers being a valid Perl program.

More importantly, there's hardly a problem that can't be solved in a much better way through other means.

Around 2010 I ditched Perl for PHP because I had been using PHP for web and could write the same systems scripts in PHP as I used to write in Perl. Sticking with one go-to language is easier on the brain.

Perl died because more shared web hosting installs supported PHP than Perl.

What put perl out to pasture for me was lack of static types, nor any capability of adopting them. We were told to wait for Perl 6 for that, and well, we saw how that went. I'm told that disabling indirect object syntax gives Perl a fighting chance at static analysis, but that in the end it's still the case that only Perl can parse Perl.

As someone that was already working during the dotcom wave, Perl is a tool I would still reach for, given the problem I might trying to sort out, if on an UNIX like platform.

> Binary package managers that chase down dependencies on their own weren’t a thing until the early 2000s, I think?

UNIX package managers started to be made available during the 1990's.

Perl is what killed Perl. I have never had as many "tear my hair out at 4AM" debugging sessions as I have had with Perl, because I missed some weird character somewhere.

Did some major projects for my employer using Perl (coupled with Java of all things) in the 90s. Then I learnt Ruby and put aside childish things (jk). I then dropped Ruby for Elixir and Python for the sort of projects that I would have used Perl for, back in the day. As a semi-retired sort, I now keep my Elixir and Python skills up-to-date and can't remember the last time I even tried to read any Perl. I know it's still there, doing work, but then so is COBOL.

What I miss from then are the O'Reilly books about Perl. Peak O'Reilly. Every one a joy to read and packed full of goodness. Without being 1,000 pages long. Oh, and CPAN.

Perl 6 was only ever a distraction - I was already out of love with Perl by then and Ruby (and obviously Rails) came along at the right time for the next project.

Something I haven't seen mentioned is that python is very commonly taught at universities. I learned it in the 2010s at my school, whereas I never got exposed to Perl. The languages people learn in school definitely stick with you and I wonder if that plays a non-zero factor in this.

I had to use Perl in a recent project to perform health checks on a container. The container authors decided not to provide /dev/tcp or curl, and I didn't want to add the extra headache of maintaining an upstream fork with curl, but they did include Perl. So I (claude) wrote a one liner script that imported the networking lib and performed the check instead.

(Side note, I know "slim" containers are all the rage these days but please please please please just put curl in your unix containers or provide a script that lets me check the container health. I don't want to spend more than 5 minutes setting this up or I'll just look for something else)

Simply python being pushed / sponsored by google? Was python all that popular before that? It had fans, of course - but was it an automatic go-to?

Python claimed to be simple - which fit well with the "line noise", erm... propaganda.

I may blog about this next year, again[^1], as I'm working on a project that sort of covers it - not in a way that will answer the question but more observational.

Anyway, I feel Perl's popularity was hugely exaggerated in the mid to late 90s and early 00s. The alternatives were either not there in terms of language and toolchain features, ease of use, "whipuptitude" or whatever, or library support (CPAN was a killer app), or they were too old school or enterprisey. Sysadmins were using it everywhere so it got into all sorts of systems that other languages couldn't without much more faff.

Its back compatibility meant it stayed in those places for a long time. It's still in a lot of those places.

The fall in popularity the last decade or two was more of a regression to the mean, or perhaps below the mean. Many other languages have come along, which have contributed even more to the fall in share.

Yes, yes, Raku (né Perl 6) but I'd argue that also contributed to a lot of really good stuff on CPAN. The Perl 5 core did get neglected for a number of years, as @autarch says, which may have been a factor.

[^1] previously: https://leejo.github.io/2017/12/17/tpc_and_the_end_of_langua...

Perl was write only.

I worked at a company that had a 50k bash/perl install script maintained by the 3 person QA team.

Dear lord that was a mess.

Moved out of TCL and into Python in 2001. Perl was big at the time. But Python had REPL and numeric/numarray which swung it in my case.

(Worked out well I suppose? Almost 1/4 century and still using Python)

Back in 1994, Perl was an amazing thing to me (as someone who was accustomed to mainframe scripting languages up to that point), and it helped make me very productive. But it sometimes would seem like the epitome of "Write once, read never". Tim Bray even remarked on its abstruseness back in 2003:

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/31/PerlAngst

My personal reason was observing the huge amount of investments into Javascript and its infrastructure (by Google and others). After Node.js was released it was a rational bet to make that Javascript would dominate, both server and client side. As someone who often does both front end and back end, it felt good to move to Javascript. It's got to be said that keeping a "common" directory around with shared code for both front- and backend is still a PITA, but still better than most other alternatives.

Disclaimer. Perl was my first real language. I have several contributions to Perl, including a complete rewrite of Carp.pm. For a number of years I was also on the Perl 5 Grant Committee.

I completely discount the basic syntax as an issue. Sure, it is an easy thing to complain about. But I've personally seen a number of people with no background master the basic syntax very quickly. In fact I was able to teach myself from the Camel book with absolutely zero background in the various languages that are supposed to help you. And during the dot com era, most of the people writing CGI scripts in Perl, similarly lacked a programming background.

The first issue was the fact that a lot of bad Perl got written. It was remarkably easy to pick up a bit of Perl, then write a bunch of code. This code was generally bad, useful, and full of security holes. (Thanks, Matt Wright.) Most people's exposure to Perl was to this kind of code, and it left a permanent bad impression.

The TIMTOWTDI (There Is More Than One Way To Do It) philosophy fed into a widespread cowboy philosophy. People took pride in their mastery of Perl, and demonstrated it by using obscure features. Like, say, C++, many subsets of Perl make for good languages. But if you try to use all of the features at once, the combination doesn't play well together.

That said, there was a significant group of people who grew and improved together. They learned best practices, wrote good CPAN modules, and elevated their game. But this group fell into a different trap. They learned the immense productivity of small teams. But organizations filled with small teams of senior programmers, don't have a way to mentor junior programmers. This cut off the pipeline of future developers. Losing that pipeline is an organizational threat. How do you find maintenance programmers down the line? Many organizations that had a lot of Perl, then put a lot of work into trying to move away from Perl. A significant number of Perl programmers saw the writing on the wall, and took the opportunity to move away from Perl themselves. This resulted in very few new companies being built around Perl.

(Incidentally the same "no pathway for junior programmers" problem is becoming a big issue for programming in general because of LLMs.)

For the next problem, we have to go to perl5-porters. The group that maintained the core of the language.

Let's start with a key individual. Tom Christensen. Brilliant, productive, and a technical genius. But also confrontational, unstable, and a toxic influence that shut down Perl development. This was a major reason why the Perl 5.6.1 release took over a year to get important bug fixes out. Tom also drove a number of people out of the Perl core.

Then there was an underlying tension between two major groups. The first were people who wanted to take Perl, and run with it. Adding all sorts of new and interesting features. The opposing group was those who cared about production, and wanted to be reaaally careful about breaking anything.

This lead in 2000 to a famous cup throwing incident by Jon Orwant. Larry's solution was to behind the scenes put a muzzle on Tom, and start the Perl 6 effort. That way people who wanted new features could go off and play in the new sandbox, while those who wanted to support existing Perl could stay in Perl 5.

Over time a lot of the good ideas in the new sandbox got ported back to Perl. See, for example, Moose. The spread of these technologies meant that there was a lot of progress within the Perl ecosystem. Unfortunately this came as the Perl ecosystem itself was shrinking. The language itself improved a lot. But the programming world in general didn't notice, and didn't care.

In the early 2000s Perl was godsend. A dynamic language that helped solve a lot of problems very quickly. But as soon as projects got larger and/or others joined your codebase you realized it does not scale. For me that was the moment when I slowly migrated to Python. So for me Perl‘s syntax (&@!#%), the easter eggs in the language, and the thousands of ways to be able to write things, killed it. It was just not maintainable.

I was a happy perl user for a long time, probably until sometime in the early 2010s. I am a sysadmin and perl was a great tool for what I needed to do.

Jim Weirich was a heavy perl user for a long time, and we were both involved in the Cincinnati perl mongers group. He found ruby and fell in love. He thought Ruby would be a good fit for me and we had a long conversation about why he preferred it to perl. It took me a few years, but I eventually took his advice. As usual, Jim was right, and I haven't written any perl since then.

tl;dr: for me, ruby killed perl.

I think Perl was very tied to Unix idioms. I love the language to this day and found it incredibly expressive for developing small order of magnitude programs.

Python was more opinionated, and better able to integrate with external libraries. A lot of the heavy lift in python is really invoking external code from elsewhere. You can solve “real” problems with readable code without the learning curve of C or Java.

PHP and Python did. PHP so much better for web development, and especially faster due to being linked with the web server instead of in cgi-bin, and python by being a much cleaner and easier to use scripting language for batch jobs etc.

I still have nightmares about the time we were trying to write the server part of a distributed filesystem (the precursor to Lustre) in Perl.

Perl became popular because there was not really an alternative on par with its capabilities and because it was bundled with every Linux distro. But then Python came along and picked up momentum and because of that, people realized Perl's syntax is actually not very intuitive to read and understand compared to Python.

python replaced it as a general purpose scripting language.

a bunch of other things (java, ruby, js) replaced cgi scripts and mod_perl as a web backend environment.

python became a "must know" to interview at google.

old perl was neglected and became unreadable.

perl itself became ugly to eyes used to modern languages.

the perl 6 mess and associated sentiment made it look worse.

it was time for it to go anyway.

Been using Perl since the beginning… essentially every time I needed to write a shell script more than 10 lines long I used Perl … eventually was also using it for web back end stuff too … kind of like duct tape. I still use it today if I need to write more than 10 lines of a bash script.

All of rsync.net and "Oh By"[1] are coded in perl.

Which is to say, the customer facing web interface, ordering, management and our own management back ends.

Obviously the actual storage component employs no interpreters of any kind.

Alive and well!

[1] https://0x.co

I have been using Perl for almost 30 years now, privately and professionally. People here tend to say, Perl 6 or Python killed it, but that's not what I experienced in those 30 years. Not that simple.

It was a combination of things, the Perl 6 announcement was one of the smaller parts actually.

- TIMTOWDI lost against "batteries included", and it lost big: It's not so much that the simpleness of the Python language won over Perl, the real and absolutely major problem at that time was the success of CPAN, which "killed" Perl 5. Perl 5 would have needed ONE object system, ONE base exception class, ONE way to do function signatures. Instead at the time, it came bundled with a bunch of Perl 4 utilities which nobody dared unbundling, CGI and a handful math functions. Being able to pick is nice, but everybody else did pick, too, and so if you used any CPAN dependencies, you soon had 3 incompatible object systems, 4 type systems, 5 exception systems co-existing within your project. A problem Perl has to this day and the reason why my team tends to re-implement stuff instead of pulling in dependencies. Python's "batteries included" approach easily won out, because stuff worked with each other and you didn't burn then scarce RAM on having different implementations of the same thing.

- Perl started to lose at the low-cost hosters against PHP already pretty early. It was easier during a certain time period to have a halfway performant PHP installation than a performant Perl installation. Hosters usually only offered CGI for Perl, not mod_perl, while PHP usually was offered as FastCGI module or mod_php which supposedly was easier to install. No low cost hoster wanted to mess with mod_perl, because it always was a hassle to setup.

- Speaking of mod_perl, things in the web dev sector still stayed pretty stable as long as Apache 1 ruled. People had to use mod_perl, but then you had a pretty performant solution. Then Apache 2 came around but mod_perl 2 wasn't ready for a long time (honestly I don't know whether it ever became ready). The Perl community at that time appeared entirely unprepared for that. While Python users were accustomed to run standalone Python servers behind proxies, Perl always was relying mostly on mod_perl. But threading in Perl stagnated and ran against a wall, and Apache 2 preferred multi process multi threading modes versus the simpler prefork multiprocess model that Apache 1 and mod_perl 1 ran on. This was the time were you could basically feel the creaking and everything breaking apart: suddenly there was no clear path forward, with mod_perl2's stability issues and the general threading stability issues of Perl 5.

It took years for the community to recover from that and focus on things like the Python-inspired PSGI/Plack as a way forward.

So, how does Perl 6 fit into this? Yes, in the early 2000s we did think, it would be just around the corner and be a clear upgrade path and solve everything wrong with Perl 5. Nice fantasy at the time. But at the same time, people were busy with far more pressing immediate problems, like how to migrate away from mod_perl1. When Python's WSGI and soon after that, Ruby on Rails came, they pressed directly into the vacuum left open by the mod_perl 2/Apache 2 disaster and this is actually what sealed the deal, IMHO.

This reminds me of the april fools email from Richard Stallman to rewrite Emacs with Perl https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/gnuemacs.en.html

What killed it was that a lot of its development talent effectively went off and worked on a completely different programming language that eventually got released a Raku.

When the team departed, Perl lost its development velocity and Python wasn't that far behind.

For me the three sigils of Perl $, @, % are the “holy trinity” of scalars, lists, and dicts that are foundational to dynamic languages like Python and Javascript and are used all the time in static languages like Java or Rust when your data is dynamic.

It would literally just be Python (and probably some php and maybe even ruby) plus "Bash is good enough and more ubiquitous for the things you don't need all of Python for," no?

I'll give you my two cents - I took a job in Perl in 2017 and set about learning it and found its community to be the most snobbish and unfriendly of any programming subcommunity I had ever encountered.

The language had many strange quirks and every question I posted about its particularities was greeted with responses along the lines of "Are you even trying? How do you not get it? Did you even read the docs?"

Well, yes, I did, and I still didn't understand, because I found them unclear.

I left the job and dropped the language and moved on to greener pastures without much regret. And it seemed like many, many people I spoke to had similar experiences with it.

Is it worth learning Perl 5 these days? Maybe to use as a better Bash?

Let's not forget that Perl 6 was announced because Perl 5 usage was already stagnating. Perl 6 was supposed to fix that problem. But it ended up making it worse.

I heard a fascinating theory a few years ago on the decline of Perl:

In the early aughts, Google SRE recruiting had such a strong, selective focus on A-player sysadmins with Perl expertise that it drained the market of top talent. Within google these people began to adopt, and eventually create and evangelize newer, Googlier programming languages.

In other words, Perl expertise was the skills filter, and Perl itself a technological ancestor of certain modern languages like Go.

Perl was killed by mod_php.

Not the language, but the easiest setup ever.

The reddit comments on this are worth a read: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1p1yjb4/what_k...

PHP, it was easier to read and use. Amazing documentation, lots of comments on the docs and tips. Syntax was familiar. Massive libraries.

lack of new blood is what kills an ecosystem.

the ever infusion of new blood is what made Javascript & Python to be in top 3 languages today. Even though things like Ruby were easier for some. Ruby not being easily installed on windows back then stopped new blood as well.

for language designers / framework designers -- make your stuff easy for beginners then it easily grows.

I sometimes wonder how different things might have been if Perl had been the dominant scripting language at the time that ChatGPT, Codex, Claude Code and other tools like that became available.

Would Python have been able to compete, in a world where Perl could be readily comprehended by LLMs?

So, maybe what killed Perl was lack of VS Code forks and lack of being agentic.

It was too simple.

(map { $~ =~ s/.*/$&/r } split /\s/, $^W x $/ ) ~~ tr/a-z/x/r x $!

It's just a bad language.

It's the only programming language other than C which actually needs a tutorial on how to use arrays of arrays. It's a part of the standard Perl doc, appropriately named "perllol": https://perldoc.perl.org/perllol

Most popular languages (Python, JS, Java...) as well as classics like LISP manage references transparently - the distinction between "array" and "reference to an array" is abstracted out.

In Perl, it isn't. It's a language with some archaic elements of manual memory management and parameter passing quirks. It's very clear that Larry Wall was not guided by programming language theory or math-inspired abstractions, but "whatever shit would be easiest to implement" (from https://perldoc.perl.org/perlsub#SYNOPSIS):

> ... any arguments passed in show up in the array @_. The array @_ is a local array, but its elements are aliases for the actual scalar parameters. In particular, if an element $_[0] is updated, the corresponding argument is updated

Theorists described call-by-value, call-by-reference, etc. But our man Larry came up with pass-via-a-local-array-but-its-elements-are-aliases-for-the-actual-scalar-parameters. I can see how one can quickly hack this together. But maybe it's time to retire this.

One thing I miss to this day is how ergonomic regular expressions are in Perl 5.

Few years into Perl 6, they should have recognized the writing on the wall, forked off Raku and let Perl 5 grow on its own.

One of the biggest fumbles in the history of computing. (With hindsight ofcourse..)

Easier to learn languages came along.

Perl stems from a time where COBOL, FORTRAN, and SQL made sense and it was already mind bending for those accustomed to those old languages.

Modern minds can't comprehend Perl.

Perl is great and I'm sad that Python "won."

Expecting the Perl community, with it's TMTOWTDI (There's More than One Way to Do It) ethos, to come together and be the drivers of the next version.

Author is wrong. Raku killed it.

Python3 almost killed Python.

It’s a tale as old as time.

I spent 10 years in perl and created a lot in it - it taught me a lot about code as a culture,importance of tests, TIMTOWTDI, etc. I think I owe a lot to it.

I found myself defending it more and more online against the folks who were nay sayers - those who complained about its syntax and it's quirks - but that wasn't a problem for unixers who used sed/awk/vim and all the other arcane tools. Perl wawa means to and end and it was the best tool to reach for (the glorious Swiss army knife).

I guess there was an infection period - the brain drain to python and Ruby meant it was harder to find decent quality libs on CPAN anymore as folks would only do things in python. And Yea, while CPAN is still rich, it's not the first hit on Google anymore.

Today, the map-sort-map Schwarzian transform is still the easiest to do in perl than any other language and it helps me whip up the throwaway scripts quick. Wouldn't change the language - I really love it!

Python.

As I have said before[1], I think the biggest thing slowed Perl adoption was the changing background of new developers. New folks just didn't have a background in shell, C, awk, and sed. This fact took Perl syntax from being amazingly intuitive and easy to adopt and turned it into obscure nonsense. As a newb what the heck are you going to think about constructs like the file test operators[2]?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44726347#44752240 [2] https://perldoc.perl.org/functions/-X

Perl isn't dead. Perl is the only stable actively developed language. Code written in 2003 runs today and perl code written today runs on a perl interpreter from 2003. Because of this perl is by far the best language to do system administration. It is both ubiquitous and stable. Other scripting languages like python constantly have breaking changes and frankly, you have to have a special separate install for every python script you try to run. With perl the system perl is always enough. No containers needed.

You can call it dead. That's fine. Keep it unpopular. Popularity kills. Popularity leads to a language becoming dozens of different incompatible things. Perl is quietly amazing. I write once and run anywhere, anytime. Other languages can only dream of this.

Um, does this guy realize that the dotcom boom was 25 years ago? The software field has grown exponentially bigger since then. Perl being "as popular as it was during the dotcom boom" (even if true) basically means that it's dead.

[edit: also, even his own graph of "releasers" shows that if current trends continue, there will be essentially 0 "releasers" in 10 years]

The thing that killed perl was python. The reason that python won is because it was Google's blessed scripting language.

Perl.

Raku

Me, I killed it >:(

Perl was the internet in 1990s. People (me) who were doing unix systems work (C, shell, Perl and some DBs and FTPs) could now quickly throw a CGI script behind an Apache HTTP server, which tended to be up and running in many unixes :80 port back then (Digi, HP, Sun, etc). Suddenly I had a working app that would generate reports directly to people's browsers or full-blown apps on the internet! But Perl CGI did not scale at all (spawn 1 short-lived process per request will choke a unix fast), and even after mod_perl [1], that got quickly superseded by PHP, which was really built for the web (of the 1990s). Web frameworks and fastcgi arrived too late to Perl, so internet Perl was practically dead at the turn of the century.

The enterprise, who either did not have any webapps or had tried Perl CGI first and suffered it dearly, got pinged by their sales reps that Java and .NET (depending if you were a IBM, Sun or MS shop) were the way to go, and there they went with their patterns and anti-patterns for "scalable" million-dollar web stacks. That kicked-off the age of the famed application servers that resist up until today (Websphere, Weblogic, etc).

So Perl went back to being a glue language for stitching up data, C/C++ and shell, and that's how the 2000s went by. But by then, Ruby and Python had more sane communities and Ruby was exciting and Python was simpler - Perl folks were just too peculiar, funny and nerdy to be taken seriously by a slick new generation that coded fast and had startup aspirations of the "only $1B is cool" types. Also the Perl6 delusion was too distracting to make anyone event care about giving Perl5 some good love (the real perl keeping servers running worldwide), so by the 2010s Perl was shooting down to collective ostracism, even though it still runs extremely well, fast and reliably in production. By the 2020s the release cycles were improved after Perl6 became a truly separate project (Raku, renamed in 2019), the core has gone through a relative cleanup and finally got a few popular features in demand [3]. The stack and ecosystem is holding up fine, although CPAN probably needs some good tidying up.

The main issue with Perl at this point is that it has not been a target for any new stuff that comes out: any cool module, library, database, etc that is launched does not put out a Perl api or a simple example of any kind, so it's up to the Perl community to release and maintain apis and integrations to the popular stacks on its own, which is a losing game and ends up being the nail-in-the-coffin. By the way, nothing (OSS) that comes out today is even written in Perl. That reduces even further the appeal of learning Perl.

Strangely enough, lately Perl has seen a sudden rise in the TIOBE index [4] back into a quite respectable 9th position. TIOBE ranks search queries for X language and is not much of a indicator, being quite noisy and unreliable. My guess is that those queries are issued by AI agents/chats desperately scraping information so that it can answer questions and help humans code in a language that is not well-represented in the training datasets.

[1] mod_perl was released in 1996, and became popular around 1999: https://perl.apache.org/about/history.html

[2] PHP was released 1994, took off ~1998 with PHP3: https://www.php.net/manual/en/history.php.php

[3] Perl's version changes simplified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_5_version_history

[4] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/