Originally switched to fastmail in '03 or so because they used perl. Kinda sad they sunset my "lifetime" plan but _guess_ I understand.

Been with them since '04. One of the very few companies where I have literally zero complaints. Still a shame they sunset your plan :(

Yeah, I was pretty sad about the end of the pobox lifetime discount, but I understand why.

I started working in the 10's and I have never met a single developer who actively works with Perl.

Sometimes I wonder whether Perl left a huge code base behind, like COBOL did, but I suspect it didn't, mostly due to the fact that Perl is a dynamically typed language used mainly for web development and sysadmin scripting.

Perl unlike Java, which had no serious alternative in its niche, unfortunately has an uncertain future in my opinion. Not that Perl is going to disappear suddenly like coffee script, but as the old timers retire or pass away in the next decades, I can certainly see the language slowly "evaporating".

It was big in the mid-90s for writing web apps, IIRC. There weren't many options in the early days. I was writing web apps in pure C, which wasn't really ideal.

Perl is being migrated to Python. Two of the big banks I know have been running LLM tooling to migrate from. My last job was for a fortune 10 bank.

I personally learnt it at the age of 17 as the homemade switchboard for MSN Messenger bots were coded in it.

I'm 36 now and still not letting go. Something about the syntax pleases my brain. I am currently learning Erlang.

Were these (bank) applications focused on text-processing or web applications? If they were web applications, I assume they weren't CGIs...

this

I’m aware of two large telecom companies that use Perl extensively, but in-house and internal services only. They don’t have anything “public” to point to.

I will say that the extensive backwards compatibility is a big reason why Perl remains; there’s no pressure to change or get rid of “old” programs when they just keep working year and year.

I've never used perl but use exiftool everyday.

I was going to start using it on the cli, but then ended up learning powershell, and then moved to nushell. I don't see myself learning it now.

As a Fastmail customer, I appreciate these sorts of efforts. Thanks Fastmail!

Long live Perl... it's my favorite CLI scripting language.

there are other good scripting languages but I know Perl so I've never really needed any of them

Same here. I started learning in 1995. I've learned and use other languages but if I have a choice then I use Perl. Most stuff I need to do at work is either Tcl for EDA tools or text report processing where I use Perl