Looking at discussions on the internet, many people have a very skewed view of how new/modern certain programming languages are. The classic example i (as a perl dev) often hear is the perl vs. python stuff. "Python is a newer language and therefore much more modern". Or "I use NodeJS because it's so modern."
Just for the record, let's compare a few programming languages to Perl (taken from the top of the TIOBE index), using the "first appeared" date on Wikipedia. For reference, Perl is 35 years old at the time of writing this. I'll use that as the 100% mark for calculating the age difference.
| Language | Age | Difference in years | Difference in % |
|---|---|---|---|
| Python | 32 | -3 | -8% |
| Javascript (aka NodeJS) |
27 | -8 | -22% |
| C | 51 | +16 | +45% |
| C++ | 38 | +3 | +8% |
| Ruby | 28 | -7 | -20% |
| Java | 28 | -7 | -20% |
| PHP | 28 | -7 | -20% |
| Visual Basic (classic) |
32 | -3 | -8% |
We can "learn" a few things from this table:
Of course, that doesn't take into account how these languages have been maintained, enhanced, reinvented and repurposed over the years and decades. Nobody could have guessed that a variant of C++ would one day be used to create digital currency on your video graphics adapter or that Python would be on the forefront of AI development. Or, for that matter, that C codebases would still be a an important part of our daily maintenance nightmare.
Heck, absolutely nobody envisioned that this little scripting language called "JavaScript" designed to make a moving banner text in Dotcom websites would one day run nearly at the speed of natively compiled C code and run the backends of billion-dollar Fortune 500 companies.
Perl had very few of these meteoric rises and hypes that put it on the cover of financial magazines. It has always been, and still is, the data conditioning powerhouse that allows different systems to work together. It can query most databases ever invented, somehow parse nearly every file format ever created and then put out a combined data report for some in-house business software. It's used to process data from medical studies, particle accelerators, processes ingress data for webshops. Sometimes it helps to shed new light onto some old measurements NASA collected in the 1960's.
Perl never really achieved getting on stage and being handed the equivalent of a few Oscars for best actor. It was way too busy doing the budgets, filing the paperwork, running the payroll and making sure the subtitles are all spellchecked. Vital work for the production, yes, but nothing you can put on the cover of a magazine. Perl might not have been the face you see on ads, but it was and is a vital part of the team of programming languages that make the modern world work.
In reply to Re: Perl's not dead, and neither is the community
by cavac
in thread Perl's not dead, and neither is the community
by talexb
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