On the scripting side, Perl has also returned to prominence. Once the undisputed leader in scripting, Perl declined after years of internal fragmentation and competition from newer languages, writes Paul Jansen, CEO of TIOBE in the post. “Recently, however, it has staged a comeback, reclaiming a position in the TIOBE top 10 since January 2018,” he writes.
Perl is actually number 11 on the index right now. It was ranked 30th at the same time last year.
“It’s hard to judge a programming language’s popularity based on some of the indexes,” Andrew Cornwall, an analyst at Forrester Research, tells The New Stack.
- — Statistical language R is making a comeback against Python.
As we know these rankings are quite arbitrary and the methodology is more than flawed due the selection of repositories surveyed and the ones which get ignored. However, MSFT's long-runnning smear campaign against Perl is losing steam.