User since: Dec 08, 2000 at 02:03 UTC (25 years ago) Last here: Apr 20, 2026 at 22:44 UTC (7 hours ago) Experience: 3618 Level: Curate (13) Writeups: 527 Location: Chi-town User's localtime: Apr 21, 2026 at 00:44 -05 Scratchpad: View For this user: Search nodes

Brief Synopsis

If you read online articles like Why Perl Didn't Win you might be asking, 'why Perl?' My take on Perl is this: you will probably start with a different language. I did. In college I mainly learned C, assembly language, some C++, some Java, and Microsoft's Visual Basic. Programming was new and fun but the problems were not that difficult. I taught myself Perl because learning it was the type of challenge in line with my main CS instructor's edict, 'you will have to learn the hard stuff because one day the easy problems will all be solved.' The work force was full of proprietary languages, strange file formats, and whatever I needed to get the job done. The problems also became decidedly more difficult. I kept using Perl because it was easier/faster/cheaper to prototype a system in Perl than to commit to a solution in one of those other languages. I feel the decline in Perl usage is due principally to two factors a) the learning curve is higher than advertised with alternatives and b) the community associated itself with freedom of expression and self-reliance -- two concepts that track less with the powers that be in today's computing world.

In my career when proprietary, closed-source systems were blocking my progress I was able to write utilities in Perl that worked, proving to the software vendor and client that the problem was actually somewhere in those commercial utilities. Perl could do the job for free. As you can guess, this did not make me very popular with certain vendors. Then there was support -- I tried using other languages to write s‎crip‎ts and utilities to help me with maintenance tasks but I kept returning to Perl. It was just easier to keep dozens of production instances of systems running using Perl. Again, working systems tend to prolong system usage and delay upgrades. I found myself once again at odds with vendors.

I think Perl is well worth learning. To me, Perl has proved itself to be an extremely reliable tool for development and maintenance of large scale systems and projects. I think the decline in Perl usage is more of a measure of our present computing world's inability to tolerate freedom of expression and individual accomplishment. Perl is about you getting things done inside of a computer. Today, 'there is more than one way to do it' gets replaced with, 'there is only one right way to do it.' I feel this is due to a heavy commercial emphasis in computing. Look at the recent news where people are suing social media platforms for damages. Or take the present trends in computing employment. People are taking a back seat to systems. Tools and languages that ride parallel to this trend will move to the forefront; others will be left to fend for themselves.

Things I think the Perl Community Could Use

These are things that I would pay for (they might already exist...not sure):

• A book subs‎crip‎tion system with regular title releases that are more in line with computing trends. I want an open, transparent suggestion system. I regularly buy books from Humble Bundle and none of them even use Perl. We should simply develop such a system for ourselves. Heck, I would pay for a subs‎crip‎tion that simply takes all of the examples from those books and rewrites them in Perl. That might save time.
• A subs‎crip‎tion for conferences. I cannot typically attend a conference but I would like one single place to get all of the content in one package. Some online resource that contains all of the talks, presentations, and links in one place that will continue to work six months or five years after the conference would suffice.
• 100% Virtual conferences in-between main conferences.

When I think of more stuff I'll add to this list. These things will suffice for now.