It's sad the inventor of the Perl programming language (aka.. the duck tape of the web) has one of the worst websites I've ever seen. If you have a chance, check out how ugly this is, the address is Larry Wall's Website He must have created it in 1993. The question is why hasn't he updated it?
For those that don't know, Perl is still a widely used language by Amazon, NASA, Duck Duck Go and most biotechnology companies. Perl was originally designed to be easier to write than C, but in a very language fluent way, while retaining common C like syntax and speed, so naturally programmers coming from a C background fell in love with it because it's easier and faster to write with, than plain old C. People sleep on Perl nowadays, but there are more sites running Perl than Python and Ruby combined. Right now Perl is fourth behind PHP, ASP.NET and Java.
Unfortunately the love seems to be fading for Perl in recent years. Since Sun Microsystems developed the Java language in the late 90's followed by Microsoft creating their C# language for their .NET environment, schools and employers have started focusing almost entirely on developers with a Java or .NET background.
One of the reasons why Perl is falling in popularity is that it has no large scale web framework or content management system like its equal the Python programming language. I know, I know, Perl programmers will say that Python is not as fast as Perl and so forth, but the fact remains, more programmers are picking up Python than Perl. As well as the fact that anything that can be done in Perl, can be done in Python as well. Neither language is used for gaming etc... so slight up ticks in speed are not enough to differentiate, as neither are as fast as basic C or C++.
I personally started my programming career by self teaching myself Perl. It was great and still is for spider mining and data extraction. Even though every first language is the hardest to pickup, especially when having no formal programming training in school as I did. I found Perl to be promising, but personally I could not stand multiple ways of accomplishing the same thing, both basic and complicated. I needed more structure in my training and Perl was not providing it. I would pull my hair out reading this way to do this, or another way to do the same thing. It was very difficult to learn with so many paths leading to the same unfamiliar places.
I believe similar paths as mine may be contributing to Perl's diminishing popularity. They've also been working on the next big Perl release (Perl 6) for the past ten years or so. Even though were waiting for the new release, they have updated the new logo which couldn't be any worse. They went from having an awesome Camel to a Butterfly. What, a butterfly?
The new Perl 6 mascot
I mean, c'mon Perl comes to mind whenever I see a Camel, that's like Linux steering away from the Penguin to be represented by some sort of dumb looking blobby thing like the Java guy.
Duke, the Java mascot
Perl has a great community of supporters from the Perl Monks to Larry Wall himself. I will always have a great deal of respect for this language and their programmers; However, I will personally stick with Python for my side jobs and .NET for my full time work.
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