Perl's Time Has Come and Gone
In this anonymous essay on PerlMonks, the writer declares that Perl is dying, and I wholeheartedly agree with him.
I could come up with about 20 worthwhile quotes, but this one resonated the most:
Perl became a popular language for one reason and one reason only: CGI. For about five years Perl was the only real choice for web apps. If you wanted your website to do anything more than spit out the same static HTML over and over again, you used Perl. This is why people flocked to it in droves. Not because they liked the philosophy behind Perl or because Larry's just so awesome, no, they learned Perl because the web was the future and Perl was its "duct tape"--at least, for a while.
Perl was in the right place at the right time and, instead of working hard to maintain that lead, the Perl community took it as an affirmation of their inherent superiority.
Give it another five years, and I think Perl will be largely a niche language, for system administration and text processing.
PHP, Python and Ruby are all comparably easy to learn. Python and Ruby are easier to read. PHP is designed for use on the web. Other than CPAN, Perl's comparative advantages are minor. And its downsides are numerous (the often-obnoxious community, the over-use of syntactic shortcuts, the crufty support for OOP).
I just don't see any compelling reasons for a new developer to learn Perl and that, I think, is the death knell for a language.
(via Dossy)
"I just don't see any compelling reasons for a new developer to learn Perl and that, I think, is the death knell for a language."
How about "to be able to maintain all the existing code that's already written?" Even though, suppose, in 5 years, nobody new to programming is learning Perl ... there will be a large amount of Perl code running in production, I'm guessing, at least for another 60 years.
In this scenario, demand is declining but not at the same rate as supply (talent) is.
There's a reason I get paid a /lot/ better than your average Java or PHP wanker.
Posted by: Dossy Shiobara on September 18, 2006 5:13 PM | permalinkDossy:
You could say the same thing about COBOL.
Does that not mean COBOL is "dead" or at least "dying"?
Or that it would be sensible for a young person to learn COBOL with a lucrative career of maintenance programming in mind?
I'm not saying that Perl is worthless; just that a career in Perl now means fighting for a bigger piece of a shrinking pie.
Posted by: Joe Grossberg on September 18, 2006 5:53 PM | permalinkI think I'm trying to draw a distinction between what it means for a language's market share to diminish and a language not being worth learning.
Just because a language is in decline doesn't mean it's not worth learning.
Very few languages "invented" in the last 10-15 years have introduced anything new. The beautiful thing about computer scientists is that they've stomped out most of these "novel" ideas almost 25-35 years ago, now. Of course, "kids today" are "self-taught" which means huge gaps in their knowledge, so when they discover something "new" they think it's a big deal.
Even if Perl's market share continuously declines, it's worth learning: if nothing else, to better understand how languages have come and gone and what features it had. It might help you avoid making similar mistakes in whatever language du jour the kids are using at the time.
Posted by: Dossy Shiobara on September 18, 2006 10:49 PM | permalinkOh, I didn't say it wasn't worth learning at all. I just don't think the reasons for learning it are compelling -- legacy code, adding another item to the toolset and expanding one's mind could apply to almost any language.
Posted by: Joe Grossberg on September 19, 2006 7:25 AM | permalinkI use PERL more then PHP or JAVA. It is so simple for me because it is very logical. but i use PERL to run programs and scripts on both my web sites as well as my desktops. so for me its ether JAVA or PERL, or i could just use two or more totally different languages seeing as i have to run an office using Mac, Windows and Linux and PERL is just a lot faster to write and its cross platform. so the answer for me, is PERL all the way.
Posted by: Nate on April 4, 2007 3:47 PM | permalinkNo more comments! Either someone has violated Godwin's Law, I'm tired of the discussion or, most likely, the ten-week window has closed. You can, however, contact me through email.