Main Content

The Perl Survey

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2010-05-27 05:53:01 - Graham Ellis

Well House Consultants - as an independent training company - was founded on a bedrock of Perl. But there days, Perl is only one of a number of subjects we teach, and it's far from "The big cheese" of our topics.

You should NOT conclude that's because Perl is less used. Training courses tend to be busy when a language is growing, and be quiet when a language is big but stable in its use (people learn in the early days ...). And there are a lot of other people who have jumped on the Perl bandwagon since 1996 - from being just about the only provider of such courses, we have moved to being one of a number. And remember - we're especially set up for niches, and Perl moved on from being a niche long ago.

But IS Perl being used less? In many application areas, it's a far lower proportion of the market than it used to be. For web applications, PHP and Ruby (on Rails) are extremely well suited and popular. For researchers with large projects and data sets, a language such as Python fits more naturally. Projects have "grown up" and Python's natural maintainability and structure makes for far easier management that Perl's somewhat maverick setups and history allow. But Perl does gain / win - is still very much my personal language of choice and recommendation - for those short, sharp, projects that require rapid coding, you still cannot find anything better.

I can't answer the question as to whether Perl's being used less - whether the growth of all IT area has meant that there's just as much of it being written as there was 10 years ago, but it's now been overtaken in proportion by other languages.

I'm not alone in saying that I don't know as much as I would like about the Perl community - when and why it uses Perl in comparison to other languages, for example, so I support the large scale survey that's currently under way to learn more. I have completed the survey, and I encourage YOU to do so too.

Take survey: [here].



Thank you.

P.S. Survey background - [here]. Survey from 2007 / 2009 - see [here] (read the .pdf ;-) ). Our Perl courses - see [here].