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from the There’s-more-than-one-way-to-do-it,-but-sometimes-consistency-is-not-a-bad-thing-either dept.
Ruth Holloway at Red Hat's marketing site, OpenSource.com, has a retrospective on three decades of perl covering some history and a few of the top user groups. The powerful and flexible scripting language perl turns 30 at the end of this year. It is a practical extraction and reporting language widely used even today and has a dedicated community. It's ease of use and power made it the go-to tool through the boom of the 90's and 00's when the WWW was growing exponentially. However, its flexible syntax, while often an advantage, also functions as a sort of Rorschach test. One that some programmers fail. Perhaps two of its main strengths are pattern matching and CPAN. The many, mature perl modules available from CPAN make it a first choice for many when needed to draft something quickly or deal with a quick task.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @04:01AM
The main advantages are social and cultural. The language is so hackable, Forget Ruby, Javascript, Python and Go, Perl 5 is catching up to _Perl 6_ on the feature front. I could go on, but the point is the tide shifted, people didn't like what they didn't like, and moved on to less powerful languages that seemed easier to manage (some were, others were not.) Meanwhile, Perl best practices evolved, Modern Perl showed up... but it was too late. There is still a ton of Perl running things, and a lot of Perl programmers making things. But new teams starting new projects are unlikely to pick the language.
There is one major overlooked cultural advantage to picking Perl, however: experience. If you start a project in Perl and need help, you will mostly be talking to people who have been there forever, and are still at it.