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Originally published at Perl Weekly 715 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! -- Your editor: Gabor Szabo. Articles Building the Second-Worst ZX Spectrum Emulator in the World with Perl 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. Creating Postgres roles with passwords stored in gopass Koha Hackfest 2025 in Marseille The Perl Toolchain Summit 2025 Needs You 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. Finding cool stuff with ChatGPT Type::Tiny 2.8.0 Released Type::Tiny - tiny, yet Moo(se)-compatible type constraint Announce Perl.Wiki.html V 1.25 etc Discussion tumblelog: a static microblog generator

Apr 7, 2025 - 12:27

Originally published at Perl Weekly 715

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!

--
Your editor: Gabor Szabo.