Perl is great. I would not say I am an expert at it, but I have been working with this fascinating programming language for a number of years that it’s become something close to a reflex.
So it’s not exactly neutral territory when someone tells me Perl is dying; it gets under my skin every time I come across it. The sheer volume of Perl code written back in the ’80s and ’90s that’s still running in production today is immense. Those systems aren’t just hanging on; they’re actively being maintained and enhanced with new features.
According to the TIOBE index, Perl has seen a dramatic resurgence, climbing from a historic low of 32 to hovering between 9 and 11 in 2025. Some argue that this may not reflect real usage growth—just a search-engine artifact—but even sceptics admit that Perl has settled into a stable niche and is no longer in genuine decline.
For years, Perl was muddied by the Perl 6 saga. Now that’s no longer an issue, since it has been renamed Raku; Perl 5 can finally just be Perl, free of its identity crisis.
None of that is really why I care, though. Rankings are nice for arguing with people on the internet. What actually matters is that Perl hasn’t stood still.
Perl 5.42 landed as a stable release this year, and there’s already a preview branch ahead of it. The Perl Steering Council is out there actively debating which experimental features are next. New frameworks are showing up. Someone’s out there writing MCP servers in Perl and deploying them to the cloud. Not what I expected to see in 2026, but there it is. This isn’t a language taking its last breaths. It’s one that people are still choosing to build with.
This post isn’t about comparison. It’s not claiming some kind of high-and-mighty status for Perl. Perl, like many other languages, has its own place. It was never meant to be a machine-learning framework. That’s not the job it was built for. But hand it a messy log file, a pile of half-structured text, or a data pipeline held together with duct tape, and it’s still the tool I reach for. In fact, somewhere along the way, Perl quietly replaced bash for me… though I’ll admit, I never cut ties with awk and grep.
Take bioinformatics, for example. BioPerl was foundational to early genomics work. A lot of that infrastructure was written in Perl back in the 2000s and is still running at sequencing centres and research institutions today. While Perl may not be the dominant force going forward, it’s still the go-to for legacy maintenance and raw sequence manipulation, and there’s no real sign that’s about to change.
I don’t plan to replace Perl with anything else. It does what I want it to do, and it does it very well. I’ll keep writing it. I’ll keep being surprised by it. And next time someone tells me it’s dying, I’ll just smile and point at the production server.
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