60 lines
5.0 KiB
HTML
60 lines
5.0 KiB
HTML
<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Why I still use Perl in 2025</title>
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<meta name="description" value="An overview of using the Perl programming language in 2025">
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<meta name="keywords" value="Perl Perl5 2025 Programming PL Theory Software">
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<link rel="stylesheet" href="/index.css" />
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</head>
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<body>
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<a href="/"><< back</a>
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<p>October 15th, 2025</p>
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<h1>Why I still use Perl</h1>
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<p>
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Perl is my favorite language, and I use it for everything. At work I often get questions like, "why do you use Perl?", or
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"Perl seems cool, but isn't it super old?". This is an all inclusive guide to why Perl rocks, and why I use it in 2025 to solve real-world problems.
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</p>
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<h2>What sets Perl apart for me</h2>
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<p>
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Perl is fun by default. It's a language jam-packed with flavor and culture, it oozes charm and doesn't really care what you think of it.
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I like to think of Perl as a cathedral (perhaps as to why we have Perl Monks?), sure it's old, mostly underfunded and losing its time in the spotlight,
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but its masonry was built by such dedicated and whimsical craftspeople, that it will continue to stand, like a monolith to the past for years and years to come.
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Perl will continue to work in its own eclectic way long after the newly constructed churches of current-time have collapsed. You can't build something like Perl anymore,
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the ways of olde are long gone. That's why I love Perl, it's unapologetically itself, and it will continue to power thousands of systems world-wide, long into the future.
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Perhaps we could all learn a thing or two about being like that.
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</p>
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<p>
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Technically speaking, I can write robust code that performs well, without the abuse of a type-checker, or the utopianism of a language ideology (ie. FP or OOP).
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Is it procedural, is it object-oriented, is it functional, no. It's Perl. It can be whatever you, or your team want it to be, and that's pretty cool. I usually use a mixture of all
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paradigms within a Perl codebase, based on the problem at hand. Perl has a unique motto, easy things should <i>feel</i> be easy, and hard things should <i>feel</i> be possible.
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I like to think a lot about how I feel when I write code, when I write Java I feel sort of bored, and problems are almost just rocks to jump over, when I write Perl I feel as if
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the roof is removed from the house, and I have freedom to approach the problem however I'd like. Finally, when I have to upgrade a Perl project,
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no matter its age I can rest assured that it will work, and continue to work. Some people call this stagnation, I like to think of it as standardization, there will be no Perl version
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of the Python 2.7 -> Python 3, or Scala 2 -> Scala 3, Perl doesn't want to change itself, why would it? The language as I explained before, is comfortable in its own skin.
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</p>
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<p>
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At the end of the day, Perl is a fast, developer oriented language that feels like rocket science. It is incredibly fun to work with,
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and allows developers to express themselves with simple constructs, in a way no other language (except maybe Raku) allows. Through my ~10 years of development experience, Perl has been
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my go to since the beginning. I've used many languages professionally, and casually, and none have brought me the joy that Perl has.
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</p>
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<h2>How I use Perl for income in 2025</h2>
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<p>
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My current company: <a href="https://molluscsoftware.com">Mollusc Software Solutions Inc.</a> is an exclusively Perl oriented business. We have a few modern web applications we
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support that are written using Perl. <a href="https://slapbirdapm.com">SlapbirdAPM</a> (Mojolicious, DBI, et al) and <a href="https://simplexpense.ca">SimplExpense</a> (Plack, Kelp, DBI, et al).
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Perl is used for everything at Mollusc, we write one-off scripts, web applications, data tasks, etc all in Perl. Also, we orchestrate our containers using a simple Perl-based tool that we're
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planning to open-source at some point.
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</p>
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<p>
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Outside of Mollusc, I have a contract with a sector of the Federal Government of Canada, working in DevOps. This puts me within close access of a lot of UNIX servers, all of which have Perl.
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I use Perl at this job to 1. bug my co-workers, and 2. quickly solve text, administration, and one-off problems quickly.
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</p>
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<h2>Closing</h2>
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<p>
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Perl is a great language you can use it for great fun, and great profit. It performs well and is suitable for most tasks you'll run into in 2025.
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If you're getting bored of your current goto language, and are looking for a fun language to satiate you for the next 10 years, Perl is probably one of your best bets.
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If you're a manager looking to start a greenfield project, and are worried about finding talent, Perl has a ton of extremely talented individuals (<a href="https://molluscsoftware.com">*cough* *cough*</a>)
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who are always looking for new/existing Perl projects.
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</p>
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</body>
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</html>
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