Is Perl still being used?

[jeremejazz]

Is perl still being used?.. . it was widely used years ago... who among you are still using this language?

[bgd77]

I use it, at work. I heard that it is in a fierce competition with Python, but I do not know who is winning.

[Jibz]

When I find myself in need of processing a larger amount of text in some non-trivial manner, I usually dig out my trusty old Programming Perl book, and try to remember how to hack it .

[Gothi[c]]

I use perl all the time.
Whenever I find I have a bash script that's getting too long or too complicated I grab for perl.
When I need any sort of parsing-heavy application I grab for perl.
Just recently I made an apache stats analyzer in perl (awstats was missing some stuff I wanted) and only a few hours of perl code gets you a really nice result.
Sysadmins use perl a lot to automate all sorts of stuff, like I said, the next step up from a bash script seems to be a good use imo.

[bgd77]

I agree with Gothi[c] and Jibz, for text parsing Perl is great!

I just love  to use Perl's regular expressions. And I know that there are some other applications that also use Perl's regex.

[urlwolf]

I'm using it right now. Parsing the entire wikipedia, and creating a coocurrence matrix of words and articles. CPAN is great, and while I like ruby and python better, for this perl is just faster and there's more built-in already.

[Ehtyar]

I Perl as a language, but the lack of progress on the interpreter and the standard library is truly astonishing. By the time Perl 6 is ready, no one's gonna know what it is. However, Perl can be used for just about anything a sysadmin needs to do (Goth Man will probably back me up there), so I use it very often. As a novice or dedicated Windows user, you *may* want to consider Python over Perl, but otherwise Perl still rules the roost IMHO.

Python is probably the closest thing to a "competitor" you can have as far as programming languages go. It's similar to the vim/emacs debate in that respect. Ruby seems to be coming up from behind there too...

Ehtyar.

[bgd77]

As a novice or dedicated Windows user, you *may* want to consider Python over Perl, but otherwise Perl still rules the roost IMHO.

Most of my Perl scripts are runed from Windows, I can't remember having problems on it. What is nice is that I was able to run the same scripts on Linux with almost 0 modifications (the only thing I had to do is to convert the script file from MSDOS format to Linux format).

Did you have problems with Perl, on Windows? If yes, I would like to know what happened, maybe I will encounter them in the future.

[Ehtyar]

The issue is simply that Python is natively supported on Windows, and it has been made clear that Windows support is something that the Python community has a vested interest in. Even Unladen Swallow are hoping to be able to keep their port supporting Windows, despite that goal being almost in direct contradiction of their primary goal.

Perl, however, is not built for Windows by the Perl development community. There is a nasty hack release called ActivePerl, which is overflowing with non-standard nonsense and barely maintained, and Strawberry Perl, a much cleaner distro but still does not have a complete standard distribution, not to mention Rakudo on Windows is no different (though that could change). I can certainly understand a newbie wanting the stability and assurance they'd get from using Python over Perl.

Ehtyar.

[bgd77]

Yes, you are right, for Windows you have to install a 3rd party distribution and this can generate the problems you have mentioned.

Fortunately I did not have problems with Active Perl until now.