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
You mention it last, but I think PHP was most of it. PHP was the first and best-integrated technology for this world, which was huge and impactful. The "center of thought" in the text processing problem area moved hard to web development. And so the ideas about what needs to be improved or changed rapidly centered themselves around "Things PHP Did Badly". And that begat Ruby and Node, not a fixed-up Perl.

Perl remained (and remains!) eminently useful in its original domain of Unix system automation glue and ad-hoc text analysis. But it was denied a path to the future by PHP, and by the time PHP was itself replaced it was too late.

Finally everyone else (python in particular) sorta caught up to the "clever systems glue" feature set, and the world moved on entirely. Perl is mostly forgotten now except by those of us who lived it.

>>ajross+521
Great point! Confluence of simultaneous factors.

PERL tripped over it's own feet (too clever, line-noise, unmaintainable).

Java(TM) being "guaranteed to be business-like" sucked the serious use cases away.

PHP was easier to grok, had "editable man pages" (ie: comment forum attached to each built-in), and didn't have "slow CGI overhead" or "FastCGI complexity".

Python was waaaay easier to read/write/maintain, and was a serious alternative (except for trickier process-control integration, you couldn't just "$XYZ = `ls -al`" like you could in perl).

...and then "PERL6 will be gloriously filled with rainbows, butterflies, will be backwards incompatible, and will be released Any Day Now(tm)" sucked alll the oxygen out of a developer investing in perl.

By the time nodejs became another contender for server-side languages, there was no place for PERL as it's effectively become kindof a COBOL for unix systems. Don't touch it if you can avoid it, and it requires expensive, difficult-to-find specialists to maintain it if you need to.