You know, you could get the Perl Weekly right in your mailbox. Every Week.
Free of charge!
Just ONE e-mail each Monday. Easy to unsubscribe. No spam. Your e-mail address is safe.
Issue #715 - 2025-04-07 - Why do companies move away from Perl?
latest | archive | edited by Gabor Szabo
This edition was made possible by the supporters of our cause.
Don't miss the next issue!
|
Hi there! Two weeks ago I asked Why do companies migrate away from Perl? and got a lot of responses. Most of them described the reasons their employers decided on this change but a few also wrote why they stay using Perl. Some of the answers were only a few lines, some were longer, going into a lot more details. I think I managed to reply to every one, though to some people I replied only today as I went over the messages again. I think it would be interesting o publish the full responses, but that's up to the respective people. Let me know if you do so I can mention your post in the newsletter. I collected the most common responses and put them on my web site: Why move away from Perl? From the readers of the Perl Weekly. The most frequently mentioned reason was the lack of available Perl developers (both senior and junior) and the lack of willingness to learn Perl. (coolness, few opportunities to reuse the knowladge) The second reason was the lack of 3rd party libraries and the quality of the existing ones. Long-standing bugs, lots of open issues without a new release, etc. None of these complaints are new. They just got worse in the last decade or so as the number of people using Perl was shrinking. The question is, what do we do about this? Some people keep working towards improving Perl, CPAN and the whole ecosystem. I still run this newsletter, despite the fact that I have no income from Perl and maybe I should invest my time in other hobbies. What I see is that I can help Perl developers and companies using Perl to evaluate what would be the cost/benefit ratio staying with Perl or switching to some other language. I personally use Rust and Python, though from the responses I saw that others switch to NodeJS and/or to Go. So that's where we are at. If you would like to extend the useful life of Perl there are plenty of things you can do and I'd be happy to read about them and share them in the newsletter. If you are interested in moving to some other language, you can talk to me. I might be able to help with that. Enjoy your week! Gabor Szabo |
|
Articles
|
The first computer I owned was a ZX Spectrum. I am really sorry I don't have it any more. Even just to show it to my kids. |
|
by Philippe Bruhat (BOOK) The Perl Toolchain Summit is one of the most important events in the year for Perl. A lot of key projects have folks get together to get things done. | 
|
|
|
Discussion
Questions
Perl
The Weekly Challenge
The Weekly Challenge by Mohammad Sajid Anwar will help you step out of your comfort-zone. You can even win prize money of $50 by participating in the weekly challenge. We pick one champion at the end of the month from among all of the contributors during the month, thanks to the sponsor Lance Wicks.
|
by Mohammad Sajid Anwar (MANWAR) Welcome to a new week with a couple of fun tasks "Circular" and "Subsequence". If you are new to the weekly challenge then why not join us and have fun every week. For more information, please read the FAQ. | 
|
|
by Mohammad Sajid Anwar (MANWAR) Enjoy a quick recap of last week's contributions by Team PWC dealing with the "Find Words" and "Find Third" tasks in Perl and Raku. You will find plenty of solutions to keep you busy. |
|
|
by Adam Russell The grep function is one of the most underrated function. Please checkout the power of grep in this post. Thanks for sharing the knowledge. | 
|
|
by Ali Moradi I noticed the use of Data::Show. Never heard of it before, good one. I liked the simple interface. Perl one-liner with the help of grep. Well done. |
|
by Arne Sommer Use of Hyper Operators along with the subset, you have a complete solutions in Raku. A must for all Raku fan, keep it up great work. |
|
by Jorg Sommrey Rare combination of indexes with regex. Perl is called Swiss Army knife, for a reason. Highly recommended. |
|
by W Luis Mochan First use of Schwartzian transform in this week solutions using map and grep. Please checkout the varieties. Great work. |
|
by Matthias Muth Working with unicode characters is always a challenge but here it seems cake walk. Incredible, great work. |
|
by Peter Campbell Smith Regex in while condition is very powerful and can produce cute little one-liner. Cool, checkout and DIY. |
|
by Robbie Hatley Nice poetry to begin the post and a fun idea. We even had musical beginnings too. Enjoy the regex game. Keep sharing knowledge. |
|
by Roger Bell West (FIREDRAKE) My favourite Postscript is back in the limelight. I just love how pop is thrown everywhere. Highly recommended. |
Weekly collections
Events
