Perl's decline was cultural
5 days ago
- #Web Development
- #Perl
- #Programming Culture
- Perl's decline was largely due to its conservative and reactionary cultural roots, which resisted evolution into a mature general-purpose language ecosystem.
- The language's culture was influenced by UNIX sysadmin traditions, fostering a meritocratic but exclusionary environment that valued difficulty and knowledge hoarding.
- Perl's 'TIMTOWTDI' (There Is More Than One Way To Do It) philosophy paradoxically led to conservatism, as innovation was pushed to CPAN rather than the core language.
- Perl 6 emerged as a schism within the community, reflecting internal conflicts and cultural divides, but it was not the sole cause of Perl's decline.
- Competitors like Ruby (with Rails), PHP, and Python offered more welcoming cultures, modern features, and better onboarding, attracting developers away from Perl.
- Despite its decline, Perl remains widely installed and used, particularly for scripting and legacy systems, and has left a lasting legacy in areas like regular expressions, CPAN, and testing practices.
- Perl's influence persists in modern programming, but its cultural resistance to change limited its ability to adapt to the evolving web development landscape.