Perl's not dead, and neither is the community

[talexb]

Last week, I hosted The Perl and Raku Conference (TPRC) 2023 in Toronto, Canada. We had under a hundred attendees, and we had a three day schedule of sessions with three tracks. There was also a hackathon Monday and Friday, and Dave Rolsky put on a one day course in Go on the Friday.

I've been going to these conferences on and off for about twenty years (2000, 2001, 2002, 2012, 2019 and 2022), so I had a pretty good idea how they work. Putting on my own conference was eye-opening, but what really moved me was the impressive number of volunteers that helped out. There were just people who didn't know much about Perl who came out, but I also had speakers jump in to help with A/V setup and all kinds of other details like making up badges. It was fabulous.

Our keynote speaker was Curtis Poe (Ovid) who talked about Cor, the new object layer that's an experimental feature in Perl 5.38 (just released). We also had Paul Evans (leonerd, the current pumpking) who gave a talk about what was new in this new version of Perl. The talks, as well as a pile of Lightning Talks are in the process of being edited together and uploaded to Youtube. And next year's conference is already planned for Las Vegas, Nevada in June, 2024.

Yeah, Perl's an old language. But it's still alive and well. :)

[cavac]

Looking at discussions on the internet, many people have a very skewed view of how new/modern certain programming languages are. The classic example i (as a perl dev) often hear is the perl vs. python stuff. "Python is a newer language and therefore much more modern". Or "I use NodeJS because it's so modern."

Just for the record, let's compare a few programming languages to Perl (taken from the top of the TIOBE index), using the "first appeared" date on Wikipedia. For reference, Perl is 35 years old at the time of writing this. I'll use that as the 100% mark for calculating the age difference.

Language	Age	Difference in years	Difference in %
Python	32	-3	-8%
Javascript (aka NodeJS)	27	-8	-22%
C	51	+16	+45%
C++	38	+3	+8%
Ruby	28	-7	-20%
Java	28	-7	-20%
PHP	28	-7	-20%
Visual Basic (classic)	32	-3	-8%

We can "learn" a few things from this table:

• C is ancient, yet still very relevant.
• Python is only three years younger than Perl.
• Python is just as old as ye olde Visual Basic.
• Classic Visual Basic is "more modern" than C++
• Javascript/NodeJS is the "most modern" language of all the popular classics.

Of course, that doesn't take into account how these languages have been maintained, enhanced, reinvented and repurposed over the years and decades. Nobody could have guessed that a variant of C++ would one day be used to create digital currency on your video graphics adapter or that Python would be on the forefront of AI development. Or, for that matter, that C codebases would still be a an important part of our daily maintenance nightmare.

Heck, absolutely nobody envisioned that this little scripting language called "JavaScript" designed to make a moving banner text in Dotcom websites would one day run nearly at the speed of natively compiled C code and run the backends of billion-dollar Fortune 500 companies.

Perl had very few of these meteoric rises and hypes that put it on the cover of financial magazines. It has always been, and still is, the data conditioning powerhouse that allows different systems to work together. It can query most databases ever invented, somehow parse nearly every file format ever created and then put out a combined data report for some in-house business software. It's used to process data from medical studies, particle accelerators, processes ingress data for webshops. Sometimes it helps to shed new light onto some old measurements NASA collected in the 1960's.

Perl never really achieved getting on stage and being handed the equivalent of a few Oscars for best actor. It was way too busy doing the budgets, filing the paperwork, running the payroll and making sure the subtitles are all spellchecked. Vital work for the production, yes, but nothing you can put on the cover of a magazine. Perl might not have been the face you see on ads, but it was and is a vital part of the team of programming languages that make the modern world work.

[talexb]

Perl never really achieved getting on stage and being handed the equivalent of a few Oscars for best actor. It was way too busy doing the budgets, filing the paperwork, running the payroll and making sure the subtitles are all spellchecked. Vital work for the production, yes, but nothing you can put on the cover of a magazine. Perl might not have been the face you see on ads, but it was and is a vital part of the team of programming languages that make the modern world work.

Well said. If we were thinking militarily (Note: I have never served), Perl could be the non-comms, keeping all of the important, day-to-day stuff running, while management (commissioned officers) is figuring out strategy.

My last job was with a small team (about ten) that supported the business unit that provided a CAD $50M revenue stream. Some of the Perl code that did this was >20 years old. It's old, but it still works incredibly well.

[Xilman]

There are very thriving Lisp and Fortran communities. Each of those languages make C and Perl look like newcomers.

I code in Algol 68 on occasion, but I'm weird.

[kcott]

G'day Alex,

++

"The talks, as well as a pile of Lightning Talks are in the process of being edited together and uploaded to Youtube."

TPRC 2023 - Toronto, Canada

At the time of posting, this indicates 63 videos (59 available now; 4 in the process of being released). It's possible more may be added; there were only about 40 or so when I first found that link.

I have been fairly busy on a number of fronts lately. I've watched quite a few of these; picking and choosing as various blocks of free time present themselves.