most of the critical projects are being developed in perl

I don't believe that this has ever been true.

what will happen if there is any other language developed with more feature than Perl ?

I think you're looking at this from the wrong angle. There is no single language that has more features than all of the others. The trick is to choose the language which has the set of features which best fit the task in hand. Perl is very well suited for a large range of programming tasks, but there are certainly other languages (Ruby, in particular) which have all of the same advantages as Perl. On the other hand, there are many applications (client side web programming, for example) where Perl really isn't the best choice.

The best programmers are the ones who know the strengths and weaknesses of a number of languages and can choose the most appropriate one for the job.

I think you're looking at this from the wrong angle

I agree completely. Languages don't succeed because they have more features. They succeed because they're better at doing certain things (even if some of those things happen to be "sounding safe to management" :-)

There is no single language that has more features than all of the others.

Hmmmm... Personally I'd feel fairly happy saying, for example, that Lisp and Perl had more features than Java and C - in the sense that they support more styles of development in the core language.

How can C not support more styles of development than Perl or C++? both are, or were, written in C. The first "compilers" for C++ actually translated to C so C has to be able to do OO (albiet not in a fashion you would want to read).

How much of the Perl we write is really "out of the box Perl"? Pretty much anything we write should at least include "use strict; use warnings;", but straight off we are using modules, core for sure, but are they part of the language?

How much C is really "out of the box C"? Ever used printf or any other I/O in C? Is I/O part of the language?

At the end of the day what is part of the language is unimportant. What is more important, as has been suggested by others is, how well does the language fit the task at hand and the range of tasks handled.

While you can solve most problems in most languages, some are just naturally (or designedly) better at some tasks than others. For me Perl is an excellent tool that makes simple things easy. I'm not so worried by hard things and often for hard things there is a better candidate, but there are many more simple things that have to get done than there are hard things.

So, until all the simple jobs are done, I think Perl has a pretty firm place in the scheme of things.

---

DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel

Personally I'd feel fairly happy saying, for example, that Lisp and Perl had more features than Java and C

Oh, absolutely. You'd be crazy to deny, for example, that Python has more features than FORTRAN. There are certainly languages that have more features than others. But would you be happy pointing at one language and saying that it had more features that all other languages? I don't think it can be done in any meaningful way. That's the point I was trying to make.

--
<http://dave.org.uk>

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg

You don't have to be worried. There are probably already better languages than perl. What makes perl a really good option is the community, which includes the great help you can get on perlmonks (or news or irc) and also the lots of existing code on CPAN and elsewhere. Such a quantity of existing code cannot easily get grown again, and such a great community won't be assembled any time soon. However, if that happens, you can put perl aside happily, as the new language will be a better alternative and you won't be missing perl at all.

If you watch the evolution of perl modules, you will see that one of Perl's strengths is that it can implement (or imitate) any feature anyone comes up with. Can you name some "feature" that can't be implemented in Perl? Now don't name something for which there is no (or little )demand.

Also, as computer speed increases, the speed argument disappears.

Perl will be around as long as there are computers. Even if it was "outlawed", it would continue as an underground language.

Don't Panic!

More features? Largely irrelevant. PL/1 has more features than either Cobol or Fortran (btw, the official name is Fortran; it hasn't been FORTRAN for about 20 years). I daresay there's considerably more new code being written in either than in PL/1.

More features can just as easily make a language too complex to use or make writing compilers too difficult (Algol-68, anyone?).

Will Perl be superseded by a better (note that "better" is not congruent with "more features") language? Eventually. Perl 6 is an evolutionary improvement over Perl 5, and will eventually replace it. Perl is still young; people have been writing Cobol, Fortran, and Lisp for something like 50 years, and all are still used for current development (for new Fortran, check out many of the climate modelling, finite element, CFD, and numerical relativity codes).

As someone (Neils Bohr, I think) said, "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future". Still, I believe that Perl has considerable life left to it. The reason has very little to do with the number of features available.

Features are OK, but they are a two-edged sword. It's nice to have convenient features made a part of the language, but the more features there are, the more details you've got to remember. It can make the language very cluttered. I think Perl's approach is particularly wise in this regard. The "features" aren't all built into the language itself; many are available in the core module set; and others can be gotten from CPAN. Thus you can pick and choose the features you want without cluttering the language with things you may never need.

Having said this, I still think that the number of features isn't what makes a language popular; I think it's the language's usefulness. By "usefulness" I mean the ability to get things done with that language, with a minimum of needless work. Perl fits this better than any other language with which I have any familiarity. There might be something better, but so far I haven't run across it.

As I said, the modules are what I believe makes Perl so utterly useful. Common programming challenges have been examined, and solutions created and shared with the community. I don't have to write my own sort routines; I don't need to worry about the details of TCP/IP. I can use modules that handle all the ugly details, and focus on whatever tasks I need to.

Some other language might theoretically supplant Perl. If that happens, I don't see how it would be a bad thing. It would have to be *better* than Perl. It seems to me that if someone did manage to produce something better than Perl, it's a no-lose situation. If it's better, it's better.

But I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. Perl is well established in its own right. Right now, Perl 5 does so much, and so well, that making something better is terribly difficult. I think this is one of the reasons Perl 6 is coming so slowly - Perl 5 is a really tough act to follow, even for Larry Wall and friends. I think it's way too early to mourn over the downfall of perl.

Don't be too worried, As will the example of Cobol, There is enough legacy code remaining to keep it alive for al long time to come. Along with the legacy code, there is new Perl code being developed every day. Even if all Perl Development stopped today, it would be around another 10 to 20 plus years.

Also, I am not that worried about Perlmonks, *IF* something better comes along I am sure it will generate a following similar to Perl.