Why Perl is Dead

Do you know why Perl is dead?

Don’t rush into the decision. They used to say Lisp was dead, being older than the internet, and now it is used to program chat bots.

I have read several blogs that say Perl is dead, or at least in its death throes.

Perl is still alive. Perl 5 came out.

What is it used for?

Perl 5 is still used for data mining and statistical analysis. The Perl regex engine, though a little old, is still very good.

There are better languages out there. And if I want a goodie but oldie, I’ll use SAS.

Don’t get sassy with me. Besides, Perl is available on Unix.

I can bring up Windows 2000 in a session of Unix. Just because it is available doesn’t mean I’d want to use it.

Perl is great for fast prototyping, especially for IT security. Perl’s CPAN collection is excellent when you need to create prototypes.

Perl has no object support.

It does; it is just really, really hard.

Perl is hard to read.

Bad documentation and poor logical flow can make anything hard to read.

Ruby is better than Perl, both in object support and readability. And you can generate websites together very quickly with it.

You’ll probably argue that its popularity in Silicon Valley and number of brand names are reasons to use it. Hey, they like it in California and celebrities like Twitter use it!

Twitter and Groupon did have to move off Ruby on Rails, but look how big they had to get before Ruby on Rails wasn’t good enough.

They moved to Java. I’m not sure I’d call that great.

I’d say that it makes Java at least better than Perl. And everyone knows what Java is.

If only from the Java error messages and endless updates they see.

If buggy Java is better than Ruby, then Perl is a dead end.