eiro

Perl lost popularity when people were using windows, learnt programming with java, were scared by unix idioms, implicity, regexps, contexts and concepts like anonymous blocks you can map/filter with. nowadays everyone finally think those features are cool (maybe even C23 will have lambdas) so perl wouldn't have lost popularity. I'm still waiting for 1 other interpreted language to have something as convenient as the CPAN ecosystem.

However I see one similarity between C++ and Perl: for decades, they evolved a lot from there ecosystems and nowadays, both C++ and Perl could be difficult to learn just because you can't figure out what module to use to get the job done. Also Perl suffers the lisp curse http://winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html (I don't know about C++).

is there a benefit over socat?

i really like https://newsboat.org/. very few keystrokes to remember, super fast, ~/.newsboat/urls is a simple file with 1 feed a line.

it really feels like a sophisticated bad joke to me but i'm curious: any real world example ?

true

we waited for them since the very beginning of the millenium, i played with both and here is the difference: DNF is very desapointed and is not the revolution i expected. Perl6 is a game changer and push the idea of "scripting" way beyond i was imagining it (and i played with a lot of langages)

yes because it's free, simple to extend, low bandwidth compliant. there are some problems people still want to solve (see https://ircv3.net/ and https://irc.com/)