A student recently asked me if perl was a dead computer language. My answer might surprise you
My knee jerk reaction was to proclaim that perl was not dead, but the student persisted and provided some rather interesting claims for his assertion. He claimed that his company was moving from a perl environment to a python development, and thus perl was dead or dying.
Now I believe the computer languages are languages of a sort and some of the rules for normal human language are followed. For me a language is dead, when there are very few native speakers, and the language had not evolved. Latin is dead, as is Cobol. Is perl dead from this aspect.
From a human languages aspect perl is not a dead language. There is active development of the language. It is changing and evolving, which is one of my criteria of a living language. I happen to believe that there are a large number of native speakers of the language. I find that I am using perl more often now, than I have in the past. Part of this is that it is part of my operating system, and can do things more quickly than other tools at my disposal.
One of the reasons for this misapprehension of the death of the perl language is its utilitarian nature. It is not glamorous or sexy as some languages, or development systems. It does not have a big IDE for which Microsoft charges an exorbitant fee for. It is maintained by a group of volunteers, and so has a small cheerleading team. No one is really marketing the language
So, my conclusion on all this is that Perl is quite alive, although becoming more obscure. It may die, but as long as their die hard fans of the language it will still find a place in the unix distros out there.
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