Perl 5 went through its "wilderness years" in the early part of this century with not much development of the Perl core, but it's back on a steady development schedule now with a new stable version expected each year.

Of course, even during those years plenty of development happened outside the core, in modules. It's the vast collection of modules which is usually cited as Perl 5's most valuable feature. Fairly consistently around 1000 releases are uploaded to CPAN (the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network - the one-stop shop for open source Perl modules) each month; three quarters are new versions of existing modules, but around 250 each month are brand new.

Perl 6 is the future, but how long it will be before it's usable in practice is anybody's guess. There are currently two pretty good implementations. The biggest barrier right now is that the implementations cannot run Perl 5 code. (Perl 6 is backwards incompatible, though it does have a Perl 5 mode, allowing it to run older code. However, neither of these implementations support this mode yet.) Given that I said Perl 5's most valuable feature is its modules, you can see why this is currently a big weakness for Perl 6!

It will get there eventually though, we hope. In the mean time, we still have Perl 5, which is now in very active development again. (And Perl 6 acts as a good place to steal ideas from for Perl 5 development!)

Perl is not as fashionable as it was, say 10 years ago, but it remains one of the most widely used programming languages. (In the top 10 according to TIOBE, which is of course just a very rough indicator.) Perl is used by the BBC, Amazon and IMDB. Large pieces of software like Bugzilla and Moveable Type are written in Perl.

Perl 6 is the future

Not that I disagree. But telling this to newbies sort of gets them interested to go do some search about it. And when they get know how things are actually going in reality. It doesn't do good for Perl marketing. We will market Perl 6 when it gets as good a Perl 5. Until then Perl means Perl 5.

I agree! Acting like Perl 6 is inevitable does listeners a disservice. Several smart people are working hard on it, but it's also burned out a lot of people over its long lifetime, and it has no practical implementations yet. I expect it will one day be practical, but I don't expect it soon and I won't predict when it will be.

I suspect that in five years, the Perl 5 I write today will still be running my business.

Please let me know what is the future and growth of the Perl.

Will it be on par with the languages like Java and .NET?

Essentially, you(or your company) should choose a language that accomplishes a job as quickly and efficiently as possible. While I would like to say that Perl should be the universal solution, that is not always the case, and sometimes you will have to use a different language.

My apologies. I know someone will definitely will get back with this question. Not to hurt anyone, but just wanted to be sure it gives a concrete path and development in future. Once in an interview one of the Perl Maestros told the viewers of Qualcomm that "This is an old and ancient language, but is still live. We have a need to develop more very meticulously on par with the other commercial languages.

What interview, and with who? I'm pretty sure that no real Perl developer would really say that.

Perl is, I guess you could say, an "ancient language" -- it is from 1987. It has been redone several times, with the transition of Perl 4 to Perl 5 probably being the most important so far. As you may have noticed, Perl has a much longer release cycle than, say, PHP, which is already on version 6 and has been around for much shorter of a time period. IIRC, PHP4 was the standard in 2009, PHP5 in 2010, and PHP6 now. Perl is still onversion 5, and has been since the late 90s(not including subversions, which are released more often, the most recent being 5.16.0).

~Thomas~
confess( "I offer no guarantees on my code." );

If your question is about the current and future capabilities of Perl, my crystal ball says "yes; Perl will compare very favorably with either of those fads.

OTOH, if your question is whether Perl's buzz will be on a par with that of Java and .NET, even the Ghost of Christmas Future declines to opine.

Being made of somewhat more substantive stuff than the airey Ghost, I would offer a WAG: Likely not, but given its competence and current uses, I rather expect those will a good handle on Perl will find satisfying and renumerative employment will continue to find employers -- those inclined to apply objective measures to their staff needs, and more concerned with the steak than the sizzle.

Thank you so much for all the suggestions. I will definitely continue to learn and post more questions regularly to update my knowledge.

Perl is doomed! Doomed I say!!! Why it hasn't seen a new release in over two weeks.

Perl is super awesome when it comes to data mining. Many social networking companies are using Perl and Python for it.

As for me, I’ve always been a sucker for learning a new language.   (I’ve even written a couple.)   In addition to the mainstream languages like Perl, dot-net, Java, PHP and so on-and-on-and-on, there are lots of others:   Common LISP, Prolog, ”R,” just to name three off the top.   Now, some of these (like Haskell) are things that wouldn’t make my socks roll up and down if I ever had to actually use them to earn my loaf of bread, but the exercise of learning a language IMHO is always very educational.   A programming language (system) is someone’s embodiment of an idea of a tool to solve a particular problem or to do a particular task, and often an entire library of contributed software (e.g. CPAN) grows up around it.

Fair warning, though ... this learn-a-language thing ... it’s addictive.   I find it genuinely fun.

As far as “will this language survive?” ... never worry about that.   The software that is developed in a language is far more valuable than the language it’s written in, and conversion of a system from one language to another simply isn’t done.   Once a programming language has proven its worth to enough engineers, it’s here to stay.   Just don’t rest on your language laurels ... always notice what’s coming down the pike.