Perl Lives!
By Lincoln D. Stein
People frequently ask why I continue to use Perl as my primary Web development tool when newer languages, such as Java, are available. This does seem odd to some people, as 11-year-old Perl is well over the hill in Web years. Nevertheless, I'm hardly the only developer who reaches for Perl as a first reaction to any software challenge.
Despite rumors of its demise at the hands of Java and VBScript, Perl is very much alive and kicking. As a quick-and-dirty test of its popularity, I recently performed a set of Web searches for Perl and other popular scripting languages. The results are telling (see
Table 1). When I searched for the keyword "perl" with Google, the most selective of the search engines, it returned 485,000 hits. The total was second only to a search for "java." The next highest hit count was for C++, and JavaScript ran a distant fourth. Younger scripting languages, such as PHP and Python, are robust, with some 100-200,000 Web pages devoted to them, but poor, neglected VBScript merits only 35,400 pages, less than a tenth of Perl's results. To put these numbers in context, HTML got more than 61 million hits, while XML merited a mere 125,000. Searches on AltaVista and Infoseek gave similar results, although idiosyncrasies in their query languages (which assign special meaning to the + character) caused the C++ search to fail.
These numbers are a snapshot of the current situation with regard to Perl, but what about the trend? Is Perl on the way up or down? To answer this, Larry Wall (Perl's inventor) presented statistics during his "State of the Onion Address" at last summer's O'Reilly Open Source Conference.
