Why Developers are Abandoning Perl
It is not new that a language is slowly abandoned by its developers, given the rapidly changing world of coding, an unforgiving job market, and the influx of AI coding tools. Facing that fate now is Perl, with developers moving on to modern alternatives, driven by poor readability, shrinking community support, and an aging ecosystem. Posts from Reddit, LinkedIn, and technical blogs paint a grim picture for the once-popular scripting language. Declining job opportunities and mounting maintenance challenges are sounding the death knell for Perl. A user on Reddit summed up the sentiment, saying, “Perl is famous for its one-liners, but not for writing large programs.” The comment echoes across countless threads bemoaning Perl’s syntax and maintainability. Others pointed to the difficulty of onboarding developers. “I inherited a Perl codebase once. Half my time went into deciphering it. Never again,” said another user. What Happened to the Top Paying Language? In its early days in the late 1990s, Perl ruled web development and text processing. With its clear syntax and ease of use, it became an efficient language for new projects, making developers productive—something no longer unique to Perl. “Python and Ruby both have a much cleaner syntax, yet still offer very comparable functionality, excellent portability, ample standard and third-party libraries, excellent documentation, supportive communities, great regex support, and basically everything else that Perl offers,” a programmer commented on Hacker News. But that same old flexibility with the syntax became its biggest flaw. “As codebases grew and teams expanded, flexibility became Perl’s Achilles’ heel,” wrote Sohail Saifi from CoderStop. Despite the announcement of Perl 7, usage continues to be stagnant. The Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2024 shows its usage stagnating since 2022, which is only close to 2.4%. The TIOBE index paints a similar picture, showing Perl drop out of the top 20 languages list for the first time ever. Even though the salaries for Perl developers are higher than those of Elixir and others, on Hacker News, one developer noted, “Out of ~800 positions, exactly 1 is for Perl.” This shows that the language is very niche for developers, and only exceptionally good talent can achieve high-paying jobs through this. The job market dynamics are also pushing companies to migrate. A 2025 job posting read: “Senior Perl Software Developer – Legacy Systems… Debug and resolve complex issues, such as missing modules, failing cron jobs, and dependency conflicts.” These roles are few and increasingly framed around “keeping the lights on” rather than innovation. In 2025, it’s not just about writing better code—it’s about writing code in languages that are still relevant to the job market and AI is helping with that. Readability is one of the top complaints with Perl. Its notorious use of sigils—$@%—and its “There’s More Than One Way To Do It” mantra once gave developers freedom. Now, they create confusion. Python and JavaScript have Eaten Perl’s Lunch Python’s cleaner syntax and rich libraries make it far more approachable in text processing. AI has helped Python become the most used language in 2024, and now in 2025, the usage is increasing even more. In web development, Perl’s CGI-based roots feel prehistoric next to Node.js and modern frameworks. As the blogger puts it, “Maintaining legacy Perl codebases will still pay well for a while, but new Perl projects are increasingly rare.” Several Perl developers have exited the ecosystem altogether. One of them wrote in 2023: “All of my Perl modules are in maintenance mode… I no longer do any professional work with Perl, and I haven’t done any since 2017 or so.” Another added, “I’m tired of arguing with the community about modernising. The language stagnated, the community resisted, and so we moved on.” The ecosystem has stagnated. Many key modules are no longer actively developed. As a result, companies are reacting in three ways: gradual migration to languages like Python or JavaScript, total rewrites of their systems, or putting Perl systems in “maintenance mode” while moving all new development elsewhere. Moreover, companies couldn’t find anyone under 35 who had ever written Perl. That was enough to force a complete rewrite. The Perl Foundation has tried to fight back, funding core development and running booths at events like FOSDEM. But participation is declining. Version 5.42.0 is in the works, yet even some maintainers privately admit the momentum has shifted. Perl’s decline now looks terminal. In 2025, knowing Perl is more about supporting legacy systems than building anything new. And while that still offers some value, especially in fields like finance or telecom, the overwhelming developer consensus is clear: Perl is no longer worth investing in.
“Out of ~800 positions, exactly 1 is for Perl.”
“All of my Perl modules are in maintenance mode... I no longer do any professional work with Perl, and I haven't done any since 2017 or so."
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["AI", "Python", "R", "JavaScript", "Go", "Java", "API", "innovation", "funding", "AI coding"]
Mohit writes about AI in simple, explainable, and often funny words. He's especially passionate about chatting with those building AI for Bharat, with the occasional detour into AGI.