Perl is dead. Long live Perl!
JT Smith , president of Plain Black , the creator of WebGUI, and one of the unsung successful use of Perl in business, recently sent me this essay. He allowed me to publish it completely here.
It seems every day I am asked why I am writing in Perl and not in PHP, Java, C #, Ruby, Python, or [insert your favorite language here]. People say "Perl is no longer used, is it?" Now, when I write this, there are millions of Perl programmers around the world. Perl5 is actively supported, and Perl6 is being developed. More than 3000 Perl modules were released in 2006, and more than 2 times, should be released this year. The reality is that Perl is not dead at all.
Suppose for a second that Perl is dead. Even if it were, it would be a slow death over many years. Cause? Billions of dollars are invested in critical Perl applications that cannot be easily and quickly replaced. For comparison, people say that Cobol died more than twenty years ago, but more than 1,000 Cobol programmers' vacancies appear on Monster.com every month, and more than 5,000 a month for Perl.
Over the past five years, Perl usage has grown by almost 700%. This raises the question of why Perl’s market position is falling. The answer is that they view website development as a measure of market share, and the percentage of sites written in Perl is decreasing. Does this mean that people do not use Perl? No and no again. This means that there are so many websites and a huge selection of programming languages. Ten years ago, almost all web applications were written in Perl or C, but since then, many new languages ​​have appeared. In addition, approximately 20 million new sites appear each year. Even though the number of sites written in Perl doubles each year, it seems that the percentage of these sites is decreasing.
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Still not believing? Well, let's take a look at a few really great websites that I’m sure you heard or used, which are either completely written in Perl, or mostly written in Perl: Yahoo !, Amazon, TicketMaster, The United States Department of State, The BBC , Slashdot, and Shopzilla. Have you heard of at least one of them? I think yes.
To the question “why Perl?”, Let me first remind you that Perl was designed to be as flexible as possible with text. And what is the Internet, if not the text? Almost every standard protocol or document you interact with on the web is just text. HTML, HTTP, SMTP, XML, CSS, Javascript ... right, all the text! It is logical to choose a programming language that was designed specifically for word processing, if you are programming for the Internet. Java and C # were designed to be able to do everything that other languages ​​can do. PHP, ASP, Cold Fusion, and JSP were designed specifically for the Web. Ruby and Python are a good choice, but they do not have such a large library of modules like Perl.
As a powerful word processing tool, Perl has tremendous possibilities for application programming. It has many libraries for working with a variety of binary files, encryption, compression, and image processing. The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) contains thousands of easily loadable modules that can do everything from creating network applications to parsing Microsoft Excel documents. Perl was designed to work on a variety of hardware platforms and operating systems, allowing the same code to be written once and used on any system. In addition, Perl was integrated into Apache in the form of mod_perl, which means that Perl can do all that Apache can do.
If Perl is dead, then this is by far the most vital, active and useful dead programming language I've ever come across. Perl is, in fact, alive and thriving, and it is a unique language suitable for many projects with its flexibility, power, and extensive code base. I write in Perl because it provides everything you need to maintain enterprise software. I write in Perl because it is actively maintained and developed. I write in Perl, because nothing else makes it so easy to succeed: long live Perl.
It seems every day I am asked why I am writing in Perl and not in PHP, Java, C #, Ruby, Python, or [insert your favorite language here]. People say "Perl is no longer used, is it?" Now, when I write this, there are millions of Perl programmers around the world. Perl5 is actively supported, and Perl6 is being developed. More than 3000 Perl modules were released in 2006, and more than 2 times, should be released this year. The reality is that Perl is not dead at all.
Suppose for a second that Perl is dead. Even if it were, it would be a slow death over many years. Cause? Billions of dollars are invested in critical Perl applications that cannot be easily and quickly replaced. For comparison, people say that Cobol died more than twenty years ago, but more than 1,000 Cobol programmers' vacancies appear on Monster.com every month, and more than 5,000 a month for Perl.
Over the past five years, Perl usage has grown by almost 700%. This raises the question of why Perl’s market position is falling. The answer is that they view website development as a measure of market share, and the percentage of sites written in Perl is decreasing. Does this mean that people do not use Perl? No and no again. This means that there are so many websites and a huge selection of programming languages. Ten years ago, almost all web applications were written in Perl or C, but since then, many new languages ​​have appeared. In addition, approximately 20 million new sites appear each year. Even though the number of sites written in Perl doubles each year, it seems that the percentage of these sites is decreasing.
')
Still not believing? Well, let's take a look at a few really great websites that I’m sure you heard or used, which are either completely written in Perl, or mostly written in Perl: Yahoo !, Amazon, TicketMaster, The United States Department of State, The BBC , Slashdot, and Shopzilla. Have you heard of at least one of them? I think yes.
To the question “why Perl?”, Let me first remind you that Perl was designed to be as flexible as possible with text. And what is the Internet, if not the text? Almost every standard protocol or document you interact with on the web is just text. HTML, HTTP, SMTP, XML, CSS, Javascript ... right, all the text! It is logical to choose a programming language that was designed specifically for word processing, if you are programming for the Internet. Java and C # were designed to be able to do everything that other languages ​​can do. PHP, ASP, Cold Fusion, and JSP were designed specifically for the Web. Ruby and Python are a good choice, but they do not have such a large library of modules like Perl.
As a powerful word processing tool, Perl has tremendous possibilities for application programming. It has many libraries for working with a variety of binary files, encryption, compression, and image processing. The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) contains thousands of easily loadable modules that can do everything from creating network applications to parsing Microsoft Excel documents. Perl was designed to work on a variety of hardware platforms and operating systems, allowing the same code to be written once and used on any system. In addition, Perl was integrated into Apache in the form of mod_perl, which means that Perl can do all that Apache can do.
If Perl is dead, then this is by far the most vital, active and useful dead programming language I've ever come across. Perl is, in fact, alive and thriving, and it is a unique language suitable for many projects with its flexibility, power, and extensive code base. I write in Perl because it provides everything you need to maintain enterprise software. I write in Perl because it is actively maintained and developed. I write in Perl, because nothing else makes it so easy to succeed: long live Perl.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/31192/
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