In, say, 5 years Perl won't have the luster it once did
I like Perl, I think it's a solid language, but it's become stagnant amidst a huge degree of innovation.
As the best Perl hackers evaporate away off to concentrate on newer languages and technologies only the dregs will remain. Without exceptional hackers innovating within the language the lack of innovation of the language will become more apparent.
Perl's been on an upward trajectory for years now. The language and ecosystem has steadily taken on features from Perl 6 and beyond, most notably the Moose object system (which could totally beat up your favorite language's object system in a fight). And the best Perl hackers don't seem to have gone anywhere.
(And come on, you clearly don't like Perl, so it's disingenuous to say you do.)
I think its "good enough" to tempt people to use Perl.
Scourges weakling humans, lets me write code like a stack of paperclips.
I think more people speak Quileute than still use J (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quileute_language)... for good reason ...
I have significant doubts about that (I speak as someone who did perl programming for years).
the best Perl hackers don't seem to have gone anywhere
Depends on who you consider to be the best, but a lot of them have gone to Ruby, Haskell, Clojure, and other more modern languages. Perl had its day. That day was the 1990s and early 2000s.
http://prlmnks.org/html/501131.html [2005] http://www.perlmonks.com/?node_id=561229 [2006]
...other places...we've all heard predictions of doom...
I agree with the sentiment against perl as a language, but we need to all move on from this "perl is dying" and "perl is becoming less relevant" meme. Unfortunately, there is no solid evidence to support it, not five years ago, not four years ago, and not today. Time to beat a different dead horse (the comments, not perl).
Seems every programming blogger looking to get some extra publicity has to cut his teeth with the same non-issue tripe about perl. I rarely see this with other languages that become popular and then unpopular, and it makes the ridiculousness of the remarks that much more poignant: people are blowing steam to get noticed. It is less fashionable to educate people into why regular expressions and hashes are not always the best tools for a job and more fashionable to whine about it.
Unfortunately, there is no solid evidence to support it,
not five years ago, not four years ago, and not today
Seriously, I read plenty of vitriol about perl and PHP, and it turns out that in the real world people ARE continuing to use it. It may not be the latest hotness, but it has a stable following in many communities.
So enough of the cool kids act; let's stop spouting this regurgitated "it's dead" BS. It is a nonissue. It is just hot air blowing in an echo chamber, mixed with pseudointellectual semantic arguments. I would rather see "This is a cool new language that blah and blah" than "people are producing less books about their language".
On another note, for crying out loud, how many books does it take to tell you what $$ means? I think I read somewhere about someone's advice for getting employers to notice you: write a book. Sure, we need yet another book that says what the last 20 said.
Since about version 3 C# has gotten interesting. Still, even the new interesting bits are rehashed ideas from the 70s and 80s. I guess it's interesting to see them in a mainstream language from Redmond; the features themselves are pretty mundane if you have experience with more dynamic and/or functional systems.
Factor is one of the only truly unique and excellent new languages. Clojure has good ideas too but I'm not sold on the JVM.
I like Perl, I think it's a solid language, but it's become stagnant amidst a huge degree of innovation. It's an even more stagnant language than Java at this point, and that's a serious cause for concern. All of the serious problems with Perl programming remain, and are becoming ever more relevant as innovation in other languages sharpens the contrast.
Perl has always had a very fundamental problem with naturally facilitating high code quality, average developers with average skills find it easy to create unreadable, unmaintainable, sluggish code in Perl. But so long as there were good hackers out there in the Perl ecosystem there's been enough good Perl code out there to counter-balance that. It takes a lot of experience and discipline to write good Perl code, but there's been no shortage of people with those qualities and an interest in Perl in the past. But now, there are greener pastures for talented hackers. As the best Perl hackers evaporate away off to concentrate on newer languages and technologies only the dregs will remain. Without exceptional hackers innovating within the language the lack of innovation of the language will become more apparent. Increasingly the bulk of Perl code being written will be mundane and uninspiring, written by talentless hacks who fall into every trap the Perl language has made for them (and there are many). A language is ultimately judged by the work in it, and increasingly that work will push the perception of Perl farther down the ladder.
In many ways death might be preferable.