One thing you'll note about the article is that the author (not incorrectly IMHO) measures the long-term fitness or longevity of a language not in terms of how long programs continue to be used that were written in the language or even how long people continue to write new programs in the language but in terms of how much the language itself continues to be improved and how other languages borrow from it. In other words, the two largest branches are C and lisp, since almost every language (except extreme novelties like befunge) borrows extensively from one or the other of them. (Perl of course borrows from both somewhat.)

In this respect, Perl 5's pattern matching is probably the thing that brings it closest to what the article calls the "core". Designers of other languages are positively wetting themselves in excitement over the prospect of having Perl-style regex support. CPAN, as someone else here pointed out, has that quality too. I wish my Linux distro had an install/upgrade process as convenient as CPAN.pm

With Perl6, it's going to be the object model, and possibly also rules. 

for(unpack("C*",'GGGG?GGGG?O__\?WccW?{GCw?Wcc{?Wcc~?Wcc{?~cc'
.'W?')){$j=$_-63;++$a;for$p(0..7){$h[$p][$a]=$j%2;$j/=2}}for$
p(0..7){for$a(1..45){$_=($h[$p-1][$a])?'#':' ';print}print$/}

[download]

In reply to Re: Perl's Longevity by jonadab
in thread Perl's Longevity by lacertus

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.