hi, i was interested if perl is still relevant in this day and age. Perl has been on the decline for a very long time now. Perl 6 (now named 'raku) not being backwards compatible with perl 5 code made the already small perl community even smaller by splitting it in half. A good example is lisp with it’s thousands of different dialects.
Is it still worth using or is it bound to legacy software forever? Like cobol.
The community is all but gone at this point. It used to have a lot of highly concentrated competance. Many of those people left (or were driven away) in the last few years, and nobody is taking their place.
There is no such thing as a junior Perl programmer.
My company still uses it significantly, and has already had one major failed attempt to get rid of it. I expect we’ll still have it for years to come. I’m at least 25 years away from retirement, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was still around then. That said, we’re moving to Elixir, and with a much better plan than the previous attempt.
All that said, we gobble up all the experienced Perl devs we can and try to make them happy enough to stay. There’s good money to be made in a long-tail language.
I write Perl at work. Supporting an actively developed Perl based application.
It’s honestly not that bad as a language, the biggest downside is that the ecosystem of libraries around it are often abandoned or outdated. The language isn’t perfect and it needs a bit of discipline to avoid creating unreadable code, but honestly it’s not as bad as its reputation might have you believe.
It has quite a few tricks and unexpected bits of flexibility that make it quite a bit more expressive than other languages - you can really craft nice compact, elegant code with it if you want to.
These days I use other languages too (Python, Ruby, JS, etc) but none of them quite match Perl for expressiveness.
Oh also it’s great for oneliners. That expressiveness can be abused for brevity in some really interesting ways.