For the second time in six months, Perl has re-entered the Top 10 of the TIOBE index, causing people to ask why a language that seemed to have been sidelined for a long time is experiencing a resurgence. Here are some reasons for its enduring appeal. 

As discussed in Languages That Stand The Test Of Time, an article that took a deep dive into the TIOBE Index itself, Perl is

Used for system administration, network programming, web development, and more, Perl is regarded as the "Swiss Army Chainsaw of Scripting Languages" which reflects its versatility and ability to handle a wide range of tasks.

As far as the TIOBE Index is concerned Perl's heyday was in 2005 when it reached #3 for some months. It's lowest ever position was #32 in January 2025 but this month it is at #10.

According to TIOBE Software's CEO Paul Jansen who maintain's the index:

The technical reason why Perl is rated this high is because of its huge number of books on Amazon. It has 4 times more books listed than for instance PHP, or 7 times more books than Rust.

Having reviewed the books in the side panel for I Programmer I can only comment that Perl is very well supported by books. I can also agree with Jansen's other speculation about the increase in Perl's popularity:

The only possibility I can think of is that Perl 5 is now gradually considered to become the real Perl. Let me explain. Larry Wall announced a completely new Perl, Perl 6, around 2000. The implementation of this Perl 6 took decades (second system effect), resulting even in a rebranding of the language being called Raku. During these decades, the old development of Perl 5 stalled more or less, and as a result the Perl community was left with uncertainty. At the same time, a nice alternative, Python, matured, and many Perl programmers moved to Python. Now, 25 years later, Perl 6/Raku is at position 129 of the TIOBE index, thus playing no role at all in the programming world. Perl 5 on the other hand is releasing more often recently, thus gaining attention.

Jansen then asks:

What is your take on Perl's surprising come back? Do you know a possible reason? Let me know!

As a long-time Perl developer I have a few ideas, starting with Perl's text processing capabilities ...

Even in this era of AI, everything is still governed by text formats; text is still the King. XML, JSON calling APIs, YAML, Markdown, Log files..That means that there's still need to process it, transform it, clean it, extract from it. Perl with its first-class-citizen regular expressions, the wealth of text manipulation libraries up on CPAN and its full Unicode support of all the latest standards, was and is still the best. Simply there's no other that can match Perl's text processing capabilities.

And to put my money where my mouth is, here's an example based on recent personal experience. As part of an ongoing project, I had Parse::RecDescent make me a parser for the peculiar GS1 Datmatrix QRcode format in 10 or so lines of code, just by defining the grammar. The rest of the "competitors" in other languages have used ready-made commercial libraries bearing the cost as well as the burden of having to understand the new library's API.

Then, Perl's strong synergy with Linux and shell programming altogether. You know, throughout my career I have met people that do all their development on Windows, never attempted the command line. This is detrimental. They haven't experienced the UNIX philosophy, the direct fiddling with the OS, the pain and anguish of trying to debug why an installation or system service failed. All this experience makes you a better, more well-rounded developer.

On this front Perl comes once more to the rescue. While sticking to the UNIX philosophy and its deep integration with the shell's commands, Perl in a way replaces every single shell utility out there such as grep, awk, cut, sort and so on, collecting their functionality under one roof. It is itself considered as an extension to the shell and extremely valuable for Sysadmins, DevOps engineers and anyone working close to the system. Let alone the fact that it also comes by default in every Linux distribution. On Windows through WSL too.

Next, syntax. Perl has been bashed for reading as 'nonsensical'. Its admirers on the other hand talk about expressiveness and power; Perl is a high-level, rich and context-sensitive language that lets you express coding in many flexible and agile ways, (as they say, There Is More Than One Way To Do It), by taking advantage of its relaxed rules and un-restrictive nature.

A very demonstrative example of Perl's natural ways and expressionism is : "next unless defined $cat". It surely resembles a construct of the English language. Can it get more natural than that?

Being known as a 'scripting' language is a misnomer. Perl is a full-blown general-purpose programming language. This adjective probably stuck because of Perl's integration with the Linux shell, the ability to write quick and throwaway Sysadmin, well, scripts and one-liners and the lack of an OOP model that people have been used to.

Case in point, Perl's classic OOP model had no true privacy. You could from outside the class invoke any method inside the class; it was allowed by design. For this reason, the 'private' methods/subs were demarcated with the dash prefix such as '_mymethod' in order to just inform the user that the method should not be touched as it could alter the internals of the class.

The newest versions of Perl however bring its OOP model at par with languages like Java, doing a bit of reversed history. Where Java had getters/setters/private methods and proper OOP, and got functional programming facilities with Streams in version 8, Perl had functional programming abilities since forever (see 'map','grep' and the likes) but is getting a 'proper' OOP model in the last couple of years.

Being backed by the open source community is another advantage over languages that are governed by a single vendor prone to the disadvantages this strict relation carries; like deprecating VB6 'just like that' or dumping IronRuby and IronPython altogether.

Finally, let's return to books. Books about Perl are a-plenty but also of topmost quality; we're talking about some really intelligent authors here. I wonder if that is directly correlated with the language itself. In the past, I've done my own share of book reviews like  "Learning Perl version 6", back in the distant 2011:

This book, nicknamed "The Llama", is almost legendary and my review reveals a lot about Perl as well as the book. Learning Perl is the creation that sprung out of the co-operation of three of the most prominent names of the Perl world; Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix and brian d foy. They have a lot of titles under their belts, see for example our reviews of Effective Perl Programming, Intermediate Perl and Programming Perl, aka the Camel book. So they surely know how to address both a beginning as well as a more advanced audience.

Despite the wealth in bibliography, the power and the vast range of use cases of the language, the fact is that people just don't know what Perl is capable of and instead prefer to be victims of FOMO ephemeral trends, chasing behind the new and shiny. 

Let's hope that being back in the TIOBE Top 10 means that people are beginning to recognize Perl for what it offers - maturity and trustworthiness.

More Information

TIOBE Index

Related Articles

Perl Back In TIOBE Top 10

An Update on Language Popularity - Perl is in Trouble

Languages That Stand The Test Of Time

Perl 5.42 Released - Still Going Strong

Perl v5.40.0 Shows That It Is Too Resilient To Die

The IProgrammer Perl 2024 Review 

Book Reviews

Learning Perl, 7th Ed

Beginning Perl, 3rd Ed

Perl by Example, 5th Ed

Effective Perl Programming, 2nd E

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info

<ASIN:1491954329>

<ASIN:1430227931>

<ASIN:0133760812>

<ASIN:0321496949>