alt Hacker NewsI think Perl today is probably closer to COBOL it was massive for a time, felt like it was everywhere.
Nowadays it is increasingly niche. Like COBOL there is still a lot of perl code out in the wild.
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> Nowadays it is increasingly niche.
Still, if you buy a brand new mac today, most of the executable scripts in the system are written in perl.
You can check it yourself by running:
file -bL /bin/* /usr/bin/* | cut -d' ' -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n
When I used to work for ZipRecruiter in 22-23, much of their codebase was Perl. Pretty mind-boggling. There were even people working on it who would construct arguments why it was a perfectly reasonable language for ongoing software development. But some VP put his foot down and said "no more new projects in Perl!" and they started using Go for new projects.
time to brush up my perl. Requires some zen'ess and flow time to grok the #@[]{} again...
Perl footgunned itself with the Perl5/Perl6/Raku and almost 2 decades between major releases debacle.
I wrote a _lot_ of Perl, starting with Perl4 cgi scripts in the mid 90s, then Perl5 and FastCGI and Apache ModPerl. I loved it as a language. But by the time I left that gig in 2008, nobody wanted Perl any more. I mostly drifted around PHP, Python, Ruby, and Javascript for a few years until moving away from full time coding and up (sideways?) into leadership and mentoring roles.
Interestingly I got _into_ the Perl gig when I bailed on a COBOL maintenance gig where it was clear nobody was at all interested in listening to how their 10+ year old custom COBOL warehouse management app (written by the company the boss's sister used to own) running on EOLed Wang minicomputers - was completely incapable of dealing with 4 digit dates for Y2K. I jumped ship to make that somebody else's problem.