Well, in the very long term, no programming language has a future.

In the next ten to twenty years, I expect Perl 5 to continue to be widely used; there is just too much mission critical software already written in it for it to disappear overnight. Because of this, maintaining backward compatibility, as Perl 5 has largely done, is vital, IMHO. In contrast, I felt that Python 3/Ruby 1.9 broke backward compatibility without a good enough reason. Based on random anecdotes from workmates, having Moose in the Perl core should help continue the Perl 5 renaissance.

Out of curiosity, I compared Perl's TIOBE index from three years ago:

Dec  Dec                            Delta
2011 2010  Language       Rating   Dec 2010
 1    1    Java           17.561%   -0.44%
 2    2    C              17.057%   +0.98%
 3    3    C++             8.252%   -0.76%
 4    5    C#              8.205%   +1.52%
 5    8    Objective-C     6.805%   +3.56%
 6    4    PHP             6.001%   -1.51%
 7    7    (Visual) Basic  4.757%   -0.36%
 8    6    Python          3.492%   -2.99%
 9    9    Perl            2.472%   +0.14%
10   12    JavaScript      2.199%   +0.69%
11   11    Ruby            1.494%   -0.29%
[download]

with today:

Oct  Oct                            Delta
2014 2013  Language       Rating   Oct 2013
 1    1    C              17.655%   +0.41%
 2    2    Java           13.506%   -2.60%
 3    3    Objective-C    10.096%   +1.10%
 4    4    C++             4.868%   -3.80%
 5    6    C#              4.748%   -0.97%
 6    7    Basic           3.507%   -1.31%
 7    5    PHP             2.942%   -3.15%
 8    8    Python          2.333%   -0.77%
 9   12    Perl            2.116%   +0.51%
12   10    JavaScript      1.771%   -0.27%
16   13    Ruby            1.128%   -0.12%
17   81    Dart            1.119%   +1.03%
[download]

As a dynamic language nut, I was saddened to see that Perl, Python and Ruby have all slipped in the past three years. Somewhat to my surprise, Perl seems to be outperforming Python and Ruby, at least on TIOBE.

See also:

• Why do people say 'Perl' is dead?!?!
• Perl is sinking (TIOBE): all time low for Perl
• IEEE Spectrum Language Popularity (see Perl as mobile language).
• IEEE Spectrum: Design, Methods and Data Sources

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