Perl I think, if nothing else, shows a great example of how a language can evolve dramatically. You can almost date the code you're reading (or the programmer, or the age of the online tutorials the coder read) based on style of the code.<p>I've been paid to write perl in a team maintaining high-volume web properties and internal APIs for a large telco, and I also spent a few years in a Bioinformatics role which used it a fair bit at a national science agency (the research community in that particular corner of the discipline had some pretty awesome tools/libraries written in perl, but the full gamut of stuff we used also included ruby, python, R, C, Fortran...)<p>Just a few days ago I wrote how I missed Perl's Moose OO framework now that I'm doing mostly Python [1] [2], and that interestingly it's this that has prompted me to think more seriously about using a more strongly/statically typed language for large projects in future.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8627143" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8627143</a>
[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8627819" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8627819</a>
Of course it's still useful. It's as useful as it ever was, but now there are serious competitors in spaces that it used to dominate.<p>I know several dynamic languages and perl is still my go to choice for smaller jobs. Personal preference perhaps.
Perl is still used in bioinformatics daily. People can write for days about why to use x instead of Perl, but at the end of the day, people can use modern perl 5 to do anything anyone can do in any other technical community.<p>The only serious downside to Perl (which is a pretty serious one I'll admit) is that it might be harder to lure in good programmers. I have met plenty of Perl programmers who advocate Perl because they are afraid to learn anything else. Still, I know a lot of Perl programmers who are so good they are not insecure and simply enjoy using it.<p>At this point, I only use Perl for ad-hoc data munging-- things that I could just as easily use python for.
I pretty much only use perl. And use it every day. What can you learn? What ever you want, you can use any paradigm: oop, functional, procedural, ect. You can make webapps, or database driven apps. To really learn you are going to have to make it to one of the perl conferences though. I used perl for 3 years, but at my first perl conference, I learned more in a couple of days and than the last 3 years....
What can you learn from PERL? How about regular expressions?<p>PCRE has been widely adopted. <a href="http://www.PCRE.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.PCRE.org/</a>
yea its still used for shell/web/config management. i would only use it for data conversion and shell scripts anymore. not serious: you can learn good and bad of language design. i guess its going away b/c u can use php/node/ruby/python for scripts more and there are more stand alone apps for shell to do jobs you used have to code by hand in perl.