trick question! Pearl is not dead. I’ll show you what I mean, and then answer who I think killed Pearl.
CPAN Report 2023 prepared by Neil Bowers clearly shows that the popularity of Perl is somewhere at the same level as it was during the dotcom bubble.1 I went CPAN Usage is not a perfect proxy. There are probably a lot of people like me who use Perl specifically for things where they don’t need to interact with third-party libraries. These will not appear in CPAN
Either record, obviously. But it’s the best proxy I have. If anything, it’s higher: popularity increases slightly after 2022 compared to next year CPAN
The report will show. (Neil says he’ll publish it in January, so follow his blog for the latest news.) But it’s also clear that newcomers make up a declining share of the Perl crowd, and that’s been the case since 2011. Why is it like this?
Some people think that Raku (formerly known as “Pearl 6”) took away the speed from Pearl, but I don’t believe this. Everyone I talked to at the time knew Pearl was going nowhere. Humanity has absorbed a great deal of the growing Internet infrastructure. Even if Raku proved extremely successful, someone would have to maintain Pearl for many years to come. There was no risk of obsolescence in starting any new project in Perl.
Furthermore, Raku was first announced in 2000, and the big burst of activity around Raku implementations appears to have occurred at the end of that decade. During that period, Perl grew rapidly, as the graph indicates.
I’m still struggling to understand why Perl became obsolete, which makes sense if you know how I think about it. But I’ve heard two reasons that impress me.
- Those who grew up on Unix systems in the 1990s and early 2000s will be familiar with the shell, C,. Strangesed, vim, etc. For these people, Perl is a natural extension of what they were already doing. Then in the 2000s a new generation of programmers came along with… I don’t know, Microsoft systems, Visual Basic and Java? These people were more attracted to something like Python as a second language, which later became so popular that it became the first language of the generation after that.
- When people learned Perl, you didn’t just go online and download development tools for any programming language. I guess binary package managers that chase dependencies on their own weren’t a thing until the early 2000s? And even then they didn’t have that many packages. So even if, I don’t know, Oberon or Eiffel would have been a better fit for someone in the 1990s, they still might have opted to go with Pearl because that’s what they had. Nowadays, this is not that big a problem anymore.2 You’ll find that many of today’s popular languages, like Rust, Kotlin, Elixir, TypeScript, and Go, were invented with the growth of the Internet and the growing power of package managers.
So to summarize my hypothesis: People today tend to understand Perl less, and have easier access to many other options. It’s an unsatisfactory explanation, but it’s as close as I can get.