Your question sounds to me like "are cars replacing trucks?". I don't think so.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Well if managers would see it like this!

See if i drive a truck i can do more overlapping tasks of the car then a car can of the truck... So is it better to be always driving a truck?



--
My opinions may have changed,
but not the fact that I am right

Especially if it is an alcohol breathing super truck!!

--BigJoe

Learn patience, you must.
Young PerlMonk, craves Not these things.
Use the source Luke.

Well, SUVs are much popular now than they were 10 years ago. For sure, cars are still around, but some of them have been replaced by SUVs. But you are right, SUVs will never completely replace cars.

So to extend my question onto your analogy: If Perl were an SUV, would SUVs be getting more popular or less popular?

$PM = "Perl Monk's";
$MCF = "Most Clueless Friar";
$nysus = $PM . $MCF;

Well when we were trying to find a competent Perl programmer 3 months ago we had a really hard time. Granted the economy has changed since then, but anyone who was any good at Perl was being snapped up very quickly. Also looking at resumes there were a lot of Perl projects that had been started in the last 6 months to a year. Also there have been tons of Perl books published recently (although the publishing industry has a long lead time so that may not be significant either).

So based on all of that I would guess that perl is still quite happily hopping along.

Remember too that PM is not exactly an unbiased set of people to ask about the health of Perl.

-ben

This is almost an impossible question to answer, so I'll just give my perspective. I use perl to do some behind-the-scenes programming at work (data munging, log file analysis, some administration & automation). The powers-that-be (I'm a consultant working at one of the Canadian Federal Government departments) are fairly pro-Microsoft, so there's not much chance of me doing much stuff for end-users using perl.

I don't think perl is the "best" language to master if you want to get a job, if that's what you're asking (not flamebait, not starting a religious war). From what I see, C++, Visual Basic and Oracle are probably the top 3 job-getting tech skills. This isn't to dis perl, of course -- I try to use it as much as possible because it's ideal for a lot of the things I want to do. All I'm saying is that 95% of the people I know in IT primarily work with one of those three skills.

As others have pointed out, Java and perl don't really overlap much, so that's a bit of a non-issue. I'm not sure about PHP but I suspect that's probably a matter of choice.

I'd say perl is very healthy and viable, although if you start talking about perl to the average Pointy-Haired Boss you'll probably get a blank stare. And I'm pretty sure perl isn't in a "decline" at all.

Perl exists by default and will run on old 90's-era operating systems like NCR's MP-RAS. All we have to do is make sure that we use the same version of Perl as the production machines (5.005)

Now what would we have to do if we wanted to write Java applications instead? We would need to convince the client to install Java on their servers, because Java is not on every UNIX machine by default.

C++ would be even worse. Our applications might not even compile on the production machines.

I don't want to oversell Perl. Larry Wall himself has said that Perl might not be around forever. But given the variety of UNIX machines out there and the fact that only Perl is on every single one, I think that Perl is very useful in 2001 and the near future.

That and the fact that a lot of CPAN modules are already written for us. One time I had to do some work using RCS, and the Perl module RCS.pm was the only tool I could find that would script RCS.

I think Perl should be the 51rst state ... (couldn't resist).

State of a language is an obtuse question. Perl has definitive niches and is finding new ones all the time. (Personally I think Perl would be a great fit to manage Java App Servers, JDK's, and classpaths. Screw ANT)

Perl will be around as long as it has loyalty. It reminds me of the culture that surrounded HAM Radio Operators prior to the PC.

Perl doesn't do it all nor is it the right thing for everything. It isn't the hottest, fastest, sexiest or anything elsest. But IMHO it's the best because it is a freely available tool that can probably get what you need done, (or probably has done most of it for you already).

To keep the automobile analogy rolling. An old Oldsmobile 442 will get you down the highway faster with real detroit steel surrounding you, A new BMW might be more politically correct, but it ain't no 442. Hmmm probably not a car that anyone around here even remembers *sigh*.

Anyhowzers, There is no way for Java and PHP to 'muscle in'. Perl is unique in that instead of 're-inventing' the wheel on top of an OS it exploits the OS directly. It exposes it's implementation with pride instead of obfuscating itself in layers of abstraction. I have to code in multiple languages to pay the bills, but I still think Perl is a huge key in making the full power of a computer accessible to the average person if they want it.