> To me Perl becoming unpopular and not "improving" has meant that code I wrote in 2003 still runs today in 2024. And nearly all the code I write now will run on that perl interpreter from 2003. That kind of multi-decade stability is exactly what a system management (or personal codebase) language needs. It's an amazing boon for people who want things to just work and keep working.
This does kind of remind me of the Python 2/3 and Java 8 vs newer versions situation - where both the older and more stable version is maintained, but most of the development effort moves over to the new version. The good news is that for a while you get a really stable platform, but the bad news is that eventually it'll get deprecated and you won't find many new libraries and such developed for the old version anymore.
While something like Perl and Pascal (especially with Lazarus; a really good combo for building GUI apps and still an okay language, except the ecosystem is limited) are unlikely to disappear anytime soon per se, the flip side is that some of the existing libraries and frameworks might fall out of being maintained, or even entire projects be abandoned, like BackupPC, for example, with nobody really stepping up to keep them alive: https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/
This does kind of remind me of the Python 2/3 and Java 8 vs newer versions situation - where both the older and more stable version is maintained, but most of the development effort moves over to the new version. The good news is that for a while you get a really stable platform, but the bad news is that eventually it'll get deprecated and you won't find many new libraries and such developed for the old version anymore.
While something like Perl and Pascal (especially with Lazarus; a really good combo for building GUI apps and still an okay language, except the ecosystem is limited) are unlikely to disappear anytime soon per se, the flip side is that some of the existing libraries and frameworks might fall out of being maintained, or even entire projects be abandoned, like BackupPC, for example, with nobody really stepping up to keep them alive: https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/