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in reply to The future of Perl?

I would explicate the concept of "future" like this:

Will in next 10 years

- Perl still have a vibrant community?
- the industry still have a lot of Perl-code to maintain?
- the industry use Perl for green-field projects?
- be a good investment for aspiring coders?

And my answers would be yes, yes, no and no.

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Re^2: The future of Perl?
by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Nov 06, 2014 at 05:00 UTC

    I would say:

    • Perl hasn't had a vibrant community for the last 3 or even 5 years.

      The last time it felt vibrant to me was when the PUGS project was running.

    • In the last 10 years there have been 5 major shifts in the software/IT ecosystem:
      • The first was truly large-scale web serving.
      • The second was hadoop.
      • The third multi-core hardware.
      • The fourth was the smartphone/tablet ecosystem.
      • The fifth is the cloud.

      Perl has no presence in any of these technologies; and each of them supplants or marginalises technologies where Perl did have a presence. In each case, where there were existing Perl projects, they have been replaced entirely by completely new code in other languages.

      Not (necessarily) because the new language was better then Perl; but because Perl simply wasn't available.

      Any existing Perl code does not need maintenance, because it is just gone.In what few small niches it still persists; it won't last for long. Certainly not 10 years; maybe 5.

    • Agreed.
    • Agreed.

    With the rise and rise of 'Social' network sites: 'Computers are making people easier to use everyday'
    Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
    "Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".
    In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.
      You seem to have a very strict definition of "vibrant".

      The way I look at it:

      - Perl is still maintained
      - CPAN still grows
      - sites like this still exist
      - books about Perl are still written
      - conferences are regularly held

      For my rather modest requirements that is "vibrant" - and I expect that to continue for some time...

      And there is still Perl-code around that I expect will still last for a long time, simply because rewriting that would mean reverse-engineering a lot of very old and poorly documented code which nobody wants to do. But true - those are only some niches.

      So yes - depressingly the "future" seems to be rather bleak...