People are still using Perl for large project in 2025?
Look, I don't hate Perl. It was my first real language beyond basic that I used for a long long time. But Perl's popularity peaked in the late 90s? Early 2000s? The failed Perl 6 adventure was about the time that people started fleeing elsewhere, like PHP.
Personally I don't use it, but I admire Perl from a distance. I know Craigslist and Ebay use it? I'm not sure if its used as much for systems stuff as it used to be.
Maybe Perl 6 was not even really needed and Perl is perfect ;)
For some measures of failure. Raku (aka Perl 6) does exist after all https://raku.org
What about maintaining the codebases that got written 25 years ago? Those still exist and needs care to stay operational. Sometimes there’s no point rewriting to the next trendy language, although it can be obligatory, if it’s impossible for the company to find skilled workers, because everybody moved to a different language ecosystem.
I know some large financial institutions that still use it. They were building big systems using the stuff in the 90s and early 00s. It still works and nobody has the appetite to rewrite it as it's a massive undertaking that would be very expensive and high risk. Better to just keep updating it to support the occasional new requirement.
They'll rarely advertise it in a job listing of course. They're looking for people with Java/C#/C++/Python experience, and there's certainly plenty of that, but also thousands of little Perl scripts doing ETL workflows.
Perl is #10 on the Tiobe index this year.
Perl can be a huge hassle because of lib versioning. Killed off my project at Amazon with internal monitoring. Python has the same problem...
A problem very solved in tooling for both languages, other than plenty of novice library maintainers existing in the ecosystem. Which is hardly a fault of the language and more choosing those vendors for your projects.
Ok but I didn't get to pick the tooling, I just inherited the project.
I agree, I thought everyone had moved on to Python or other languages.
Yeah I don't think anyone really uses it. Perl 5 is dead and Perl 6/Raku was never alive.
Weird donation if you ask me. There are many many many more interesting languages that I would rather see succeed. Koka, Hylo, Vale, Whiley, Lobster, etc.