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It surprises me Perl isn't dead yet - in fact, German Bundeskriminalamt built a website for people having information about the German nazi hool riots during the France EM 2016 in Perl: https://www.bka-hinweisportal.de/



Why would this surprise you? Perl continues to improve and is battle tested. More Perl is written today than ever before (that said, much more software in general is written than ever before, and there is no doubt Perl's share has declined). Particularly if you're doing lots of text processing Perl remains a great choice.


> Particularly if you're doing lots of text processing Perl remains a great choice.

And, when you get right down to it, a huge chunk of web dev falls into that category.


A huge chunk of life is text processing nowadays.



These are really not great talks at all. The speaker doesn't seem to actually know much about Perl, and it seems like the flaws he's found have little to do with Perl, and more to do with just writing insecure code.

See http://blogs.perl.org/users/joel_berger/2015/12/response-to-... for one response and some discussion in the comments.



Perl Just Works, it's fun to work with, and has either the same quality or better tooling that comparable languages.

Once you're used to Perl's testing tools, anything else feels chaotic and poorly thought-out.


Perl is bundled with many linux distributions and is a hard dependency for many popular programs. It isn't going away.


On the other hand, bundled Perl versions have been a bane as much as a boon for the language. After a lull because everyone was holding their breath for Perl6, there's been a decent amount of development regarding the Perl interpreter, and if your target server still bundles 5.0008...

And upgrading that might risk incompatible system services, which is why sysadmins usually have way fewer problems adding something like Perl or Python. Isolated language environments (cf. perlbrew) are a nice solution to this, at least until you happen upon a particular paranoid admin.


Neither is m4!




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