On the ever impending demise of Perl
Scott (who has thankfully started blogging again) points out the new O’Reilly post showing the graph of technical book sales broken down by language.
Now among many other things this chart reveals that Ruby is way up in the ranks and perl (and surprisingly php, too) are down quite a bit. The chart is a comparison of Q1 2007 vs Q1 2006, so it’s a pretty small period of time, I actually would have preferred to see something like all of 2006 vs all of 2005.
This could be, as Scott suggests, the canary in the coal mine for perl. I, having heard too many times over the years about the death of perl (or indeed the death of this language or that), am skeptical of that conclusion. The first point is that Perl has a huge installed base, is a very mature language, has fantastic online and installed documentation and there’s a lot of perl books already floating around. If you go to work for a company using Perl (and there are lots of them) chances are there’s already half a dozen copies of the key books for you to borrow, obviating the need to buy. Hmm, that may seem like several points, but really it’s one fundamental point, perl is an established language not an emerging one.
Second if you look at the dates that O’Reilly has published perl books and ruby books you’ll notice something. Fully 6 new books on Ruby were published at the end of 2006 and first quarter of 2007. For perl, no directly related Perl text has been published since Building Tag Clouds in Perl and PHP in May 2006. So, there was really nothing to buy in the perl world, to boost it’s presence.
Third the chart itself, I believe, will show a hype bias. That is they count their numbers using a “language dimension” (quote theirs, not mine) - they describe it thusly:
Our view on languages is not just strictly about programming with a particular language, although we capture those very easily, but that the book being categorized has code examples in a particular language. So Flash Programming with Java would be in our Flash atomic category, but the language dimension would be Java.
In the world of programmers Perl is the language they all love to hate. I have read several books lately that have included Ruby snippets and not Perl snippets. Clearly this reflects that bias - if you believe that there are more Ruby developers than Perl developers, or that Ruby is used in more actual live projects than Perl, you are bonkers. But, in this chart (assuming I understand correctly), it would increase the number of Ruby books purchased.
I think the post is interesting and it is nice to see hard numbers on these things. But I wouldn’t read too much into it, the time span, I believe is too short to infer significant meaning.
UPDATE: Found this interesting post on a Ruby guy’s perspective. He brings up another chart (the TIOBE index, which I’d never heard of before) and analyzes it. That index is pretty interesting as well, coming at the popularity of programming languages from a completely different perspective.
May 18th, 2007 at 1:41 pm
me, I think that book sales are not correlated in any way to the number of people actually coding in one language or another. book sales are all about desire. by and large they reflect the number of people that want to code in that language. i’d guess that the ratio of the number of people who own Perl Best Practices or Object Oriented Perl to the number of people who read them is 20:1 or worse.
what isn’t here is that the O’Reilly perl books are to be had in many places with one google search at any time, thanks to rampant piracy of their bookshelf cds, while pirated ruby books are actually hard to come by.
all that said, I think that perl is dying and so are is the job that the perl coder used to occupy. my company has moved to a “no in house coding” position that is rather hard to deal with and they tell me that this is a trend in the industry, which I think is awful.
May 18th, 2007 at 3:30 pm
Shh, no mention of piracy here! You never know who’s listening.. hm…
:) As for no in house coding, a) that’s crazy, b) that someone says it is an industry trend does not necessarily make it so and c) even if it is so, the people who’ve had it outsourced to are as likely to be using perl as you were. No?
September 16th, 2007 at 9:50 am
[...] language of choice for CGI scripting, it’s been “dieing” or “dead”. Perl’s dead, nobody’s using it. Everybody hates it, you can’t read it, you don’t know what [...]