I believe it all depends on where you use Perl.

I tend to use it as a powerful, glue language on the back end, where I pour over 35 million lines of data through the regex engine. In that particular area, it is not losing momentum by any means. If I need a front end beyond a basic CLI, I might look into perltk for it, but for the most part my jobs run in batch.

Now, why Perl? The system was organically grown, and using a simple-to-implement, ubinquitously available language like Perl was the best choice. But what about languages like Ruby and Python? Ruby is excellent for the OO-esque paradigm, but is not the best for firefighting. Similar arguments can be made for Python, although I'm seeing a resurgence of Jython on GUI side of things.

In the end it all comes down to your specific problem domain, time constraints, business objectives, and deliverable schedule.

Hope this helped,
-v.
"Perl. There is no substitute."

In reply to Re: Perl losing momentum ? by Velaki
in thread Perl losing momentum ? by spurperl

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