Re^2: Perl is dying

[nimdokk]

I'd have to agree here. We do not use Perl for any web applications yet 98% of our jobs are written in Perl because I could write one script and use it on either Windows (running Activestate Perl) or on Unix running the installed version of Perl and you wouldn't need to do anything different becuase of the platform (granted there was a lot of platform specific operations that are done behind the scenes in a custom module). Being able to create a custom module allows us to have scripts that use functions out of that and if we update something, that update is carried out for all scripts using it (one change rather than having to change several hundred scripts in a variety of places). I also use it to parse log files and put them into a coherent format for reporting. Perl also has the advantage of being very fast. I've pulled reports out of logs and been able to parse large amounts of data within a few minutes. Perl's regex's are great as well, I'm in the process of convincing our software vendor to enhance the use of regex's in a program they wrote in Perl.

I don't think it's dying, perhaps it's just not growing as quickly as some would like. Of course if it really stops growing, then it will die (like any other language in the world - take Latin for instance). However, my opinion is that's a long way off since there is a lot of work being done, especially with CPAN to extend what you can do with Perl.

Just by 2 pence :-)