alt Hacker NewsI can't read this article due to the paywall, but here's my lukewarm take based on the title at least: "nobody" codes in Perl any more because the language lost a lot of mindshare in the transition from Perl 5 to Perl 6, a.k.a. Raku. And regardless it's always been a fairly idiosyncratic language in a lot of ways. Stuff like Ruby (which inherits DNA from Perl along with Lisp and Smalltalk), PHP (also takes some notes from Perl, perhaps more superficially), and Python ate a lot of its lunch.
It was the first language I wrote professionally and I always thought it was a lot of fun, but if I want to be humbled these days I reach for Haskell (like a lot of the Perl community it sounds like...).
EDIT: okay I read the article, thanks to welpo for the archive link. Yeah this is kind of a nostalgic piece so I think my original comment is still relevant. I do like Perl still, I will always have a spot in my heart for it. I appreciate especially how seriously Larry Wall tried to think about approaching things vis-a-vis linguistics even if I don't necessarily think that's the best approach for a language used by an engineering team these days.
I hope it sticks around in any case. It is truly unique.
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I used Perl extensively for small-network (~25 boxen) sysadmin and local/personal tooling, but never in cluster/multi-node deployed production. It gave too much freedom for expression making it difficult to "team-scale".
I stopped using it circa 2000 for no real reason other than Python was easier for teams to adopt and common modules became well-maintained enough where CPAN was no longer a competitive advantage. It also helped that Guido lived and worked a few minutes north in Reston, VA back then.
That said, I still "think" in Perl regex to this very day. ;)
Like many paywalls it goes away if you turn off JS.
I agree it was a combination of Raku and Ruby. As far as I'm concerned, Ruby deprecates Perl 5. It fills the same niche while avoiding a lot of the absolutely crazier parts of Perl (no shade; Perl was designed in a far different time and place). If you know Ruby, there is essentially zero reason to learn Perl. I have fond memories of the language, it was the first one I wrote professionally, but never again.
Raku being in such an indeterminate state for so long was an eternity for it to lose mindshare to Ruby.