zlacker

>>speckx+(OP)
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.

>>autarc+ZJ
I would also say -- in the late 90s, Perl's claim to fame was that it had CPAN. At the time, CPAN was revolutionary: a big, centralized repo of open-source libraries, which you could install with a single command.

Now, of course, that's a common and maybe even expected thing for a library to have: Python has Pypi, Javascript has NPM, etc.

>>Taikon+bO
And the whole culture around CPAN, too, with the likes of Module::Build and Test::Harness and the strong expectations around POD documents. Nothing like that existed for the other scripting languages of the time.

There was a well-trodden path from writing a hacky one-off script to deal with a specific task, to realising "hey! this might be useful for others too!" and trying to make it a bit more generic, to checking in with your local Perl Mongers for advice, to turning it into a well-tested, well-documented CPAN module.

That was the route I followed as an early-career sysadmin in the dying days of the dotcom boom - it helped me take on much more of an "engineering" mindset, and was an important foundation for my later career.

I can't have written more than a few dozen lines of Perl in the last 15 years, but do I owe that community and culture a lot.