I think this question is usually phrased "What's the killer application?" (or similar).

I'm not following perl since the old days of perl 1.0 so my impression could be wrong, but I never thought of perl having one specific killer app.

CPAN is one, of course, but it's not the thing that really attracts people and that causes a hype.

But do we really need one? Do we want people to think "Perl? Isn't that the langue you're forced to use if you want $CoolTool?"?

I'd also like to know what happens to a language when its killer application loses popularity - any experiences here?

(BTW perl has many "killer features" like regexes and hashes - but other languages have them as well. Perl 6 will bring many more "killer features" like grammars and junctions.)

In reply to Re: What can bring the excitement back to Perl? by moritz
in thread What can bring the excitement back to Perl? by zby

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