hi, i was interested if perl is still relevant in this day and age. Perl has been on the decline for a very long time now. Perl 6 (now named 'raku) not being backwards compatible with perl 5 code made the already small perl community even smaller by splitting it in half. A good example is lisp with it’s thousands of different dialects.
Is it still worth using or is it bound to legacy software forever? Like cobol.
I work at a small company that still uses perl for everything. It works, the company makes money. They’ll never move off it. I bet there’s a lot of little places like that, but I doubt many are starting new projects with it. Not many of the major modules have a lot of updates recently, but they’ve also been pretty complete for a long time. If you already know shell/awk/grep/etc it’s pretty easy to pick up. Probably will see less and less of it as the people that do write in it continue to age.
Personally, I never figured out awk and sed, and only the basics of heel because I’ll just use Perl if I need and if the things those tools do.
You can do cool and complex stuff with it (I have), but it’s really unparalleled for folding, stapling, and mutilating text in a CLI environment.