Is Perl Still Used
Yes, Perl is still used and there are still a significant number of applications that use Perl.
Perl is used for system administration, E-commerce, web development, network programming, finance, bioinformatics, and other applications.
According to statistics from w3techs.com, “Perl is used by 0.2% of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know.”
Since its development by Larry Wall in 1987, Perl grew in popularity and usage in web development and other software development fields.
in 2005, Perl was the 3rd most popular programming language according to the TIOBE INDEX.
But in recent times, its popularity has drastically decreased due to the emergence of newer, feature-rich, and easy-to-use programming languages.
There are still many popular applications and companies using Perl, some of them include Amazon, cPanel, Priceline.com, IMDB, BBC, Craigslist, Duckduckgo, Booking.com, MIT, Roblox, TicketMaster, and many others.
It can be seen that Perl is, trusted and used by a lot of big companies and businesses.
Many hosting companies provide great support for Perl, meaning hosting your Perl-based project will be easy.
PERL’S POPULARITY
Although Perl is a highly capable, feature-rich programming language with over 30 years of development, its popularity has been decreasing drastically.
According to a Stack Overflow survey of 2022, Perl is the 29th most popular programming language. It is used by 2.21% of professional developers.
Further, Perl is only loved by 34.98% of developers versus 65.02% of developers who dreaded it according to the same survey.
The TIOBE index 2023 ranks Perl as the 25th most popular programming language with a 0.44% rating, in comparison, the most popular programming language Python has a rating of 14.51%.
IS PERL STILL WORTH LEARNING
Yes, Perl is still worth learning because there are a lot of big companies that still use Perl and need Perl developers to work on these codebases.
Perl is among the high-paying programming language because there are few talented Perl developers.
According to a Stack Overflow survey of top-paying programming languages, Perl developers are the 8th highest-paid developers.
They get an average salary of $90,073 per year, higher than developers who use languages like Python, Javascript, Go, Rust, Java, PHP, and many others.
Glassdoor reported that in the United States, Perl Developers with 1 – 3 years of experience get an estimated total pay of $107,410 per year.
Learning Perl puts you among some of the highly-paid developers in the industry. Although Perl is not as popular as it used to be, Learning Perl can help you to earn more.
SHOULD I USE PERL IN 2023
If you are starting a project from scratch or building a product for your company, using Perl may not be the best approach, this is because there are few Perl developers these days.
Finding talented Perl developers to work with may not be easy. If you do find and hire Perl developers, most of them will need a higher salary.
Perl developers are expensive to hire, if you are starting a project from scratch, consider using languages that have a large pool of talented developers who you can easily hire.
IS PERL A DEAD LANGUAGE
No, Perl is not a dead language. Although its popularity has decreased, Perl is still actively maintained and updated.
Perl has been around for more than three decades and has a large community of users and developers.
Many companies like Amazon, cPanel, Priceline.com, IMDB, BBC, Craigslist, Duckduckgo, Booking.com, MIT, Roblox, TicketMaster, etc. use Perl to power some of their applications.
WHAT WILL REPLACE PERL
Perl can be replaced by many languages are good at text processing, system administration, and web development such as Python or Ruby.
Although it is difficult to predict which language will replace Perl, there are other programming languages that have gained popularity in recent years and are being used for similar purposes as Perl.
Python, for example, is a popular language for text processing and web development, and its ease of use and readability have made it an attractive choice for many developers.
Ruby is another language that has gained popularity in recent years, and it shares some similarities with Perl, such as a focus on text processing and a flexible syntax.
Other people consider Raku as a language to replace Perl. Raku is a member of the Perl family, it was not intended to replace Perl but it can be used in many places where Perl is used.
CONCLUSION
Perl is still used by companies and individual developers. There are still a huge number of systems and applications that rely on Perl to work effectively.
Many big companies still need Perl developers to maintain their Perl codebase and most Perl developers fetch higher salaries than other developers.