It’s hard to objectively measure Perl’s popularity compared to Python or Ruby. Even before nerds-central used job availability as a measurement, the ease of finding a job was a key requirement for me.
Who cares if I love Ruby if I can’t use it for the 10 hours a day I’m working?
Anecdotal evidence
In the last twelve years I’ve had no difficulty finding plenty of Perl work. In the past couple of years, I’ve had a few calls about Python jobs, but probably ten times fewer than the number of Perl calls I get. Hold the front page – Perl is ten times more popular than Python.
Well, no. Of course I get a lot more Perl calls. I’m a Perl programmer, and my résumé mentions Perl all over the place. Anyone calling about Python must really be desperate!
But I notice that a lot of Python programmers working at Python-centric firms apply similar logic. All the folks they work with do Python, clearly no-one does Perl anymore. Thank goodness – Python is finally the winner it always deserved to be.
Why do people care?
Network effects are important. All other things being equal, a language with more users will get more libraries, will have more companies using it, will get more users, will get more libraries, etc. vs a language with fewer users. And, popularity aside, none of the big three scripting languages has a huge advantage over the others.
Except of course that Perl was the first mover.
So, what can you do if you don’t have a real advantage you can point to? That’s right – you trash-talk the leader, hope you can convince enough people there is a real problem and when they jump ship hopefully you’ll be the one left with the positive feedback loop.
Thanks for linking to me :)
I totally buy into your ‘trash-talk the leader’ comment. I did not write the post because I am a huge Perl advocate, but because I found the figures interesting. It was amazing so see how much effort people then went to in pursuit of trashing Perl!
I have heard a lot about moose and modern Perl. Any thoughts?
Take care – AJ
Hi AJ,
No worries – I found your figures interesting too, and I am a huge Perl advocate :)
I figure Python users realise that Perl still has a significant lead and that’s why they invest so much energy into the trash-talking. Rubyists are further behind so they need to catch up a bit before it will be worth it.
Moose is a great library. I have a little experience of Python, and less of Ruby, and from what I know of them, Moose is a step beyond either. For smaller scripts, almost anything will do and the slightly clearer syntax of Python is probably a win for anything less than 100 lines. For large systems it is good to have a well thought out type system.
As to modern perl, that means a lot of things to a lot of different people. For sure, chromatic’s ebook is an asset for the perl community. But anyone who wants to write large maintainable systems in perl has to give some thought as to how they are going to use the language. I suspect it is the same for all languages though.
I’m not sure if I answered your questions there.