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canopic jug [soylentnews.org] writes:

Hacker Dave Cross has written a short blog post about how Perl’s early success created the seeds of its downfall [perlhacks.com] or, as he puts it, made it a victim of the Dotcom Survivor Syndrome. From the 90s through the 00s, Perl had been not just part of the WWW but in many ways instrumental in actually creating the WWW as we knew it in its prime. Perl and the community around it have improved a lot in the last 25 years, even if the versioning might disguise that fact.

To understand the long shadow Perl casts, you have to understand the speed and pressure of the dot-com boom.

We weren’t just building websites.
We were inventing how to build websites.

Best practices? Mostly unwritten.
Frameworks? Few existed.
Code reviews? Uncommon.
Continuous integration? Still a dream.

The pace was frantic. You built something overnight, demoed it in the morning, and deployed it that afternoon. And Perl let you do that.

But that same flexibility—its greatest strength—became its greatest weakness in that environment. With deadlines looming and scalability an afterthought, we ended up with:
[...]

It did not help that there has been every appearance of ongoing M$ whisper campaigns maligning Perl since the 00s. For text processing, there is still nothing better. And, as has been pointed out countless times already, the WWW is text (i.e. XML and co).

Previously:
(2020) Announcing Perl 7 [soylentnews.org]
(2019) Perl Is Still The Goddess For Text Manipulation [soylentnews.org]
(2017) Perl, the Glue That Holds the Internet (and SN) Together, Turns 30 This Year [soylentnews.org]

Original Submission