Perl is Dead… or not.
You know ever since a brief shining moment in the mid-late 90’s when it was the 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 you did 5 minutes after you wrote it, it’s the language everyone can ignorantly make fun of.
And yet, for some reason, it is still around and still quietly being developed. It doesn’t try to tell you the “right” way to do things, it isn’t a holier than thou language *cough*ruby*cough*python* - it just lets you get it done. Sure, it lets you write some awful code if you don’t know what you’re doing - the barrier to entry for coding it is very low, so you can do stuff with very little knowledge. That’s a strength but also the source of a reputation for bad code.
Anyhow, I digress. I came across this little gem on use.perl where someone write a script to parse through the job listings on Dice and graph the results by language:
I hate to protest too much, but I don’t think I am in comparison to the amount of other folks claiming that Perl is over.
