With Perl 6 coming up, now is a good time to assess the various popular web programming tools. It seems like a certain backlash is happening against the venerable interpreted language, of course it’s hard to tell how much of that is from bloggers complaining about Movable Type. I’ve heard that dealing with old Perl code is sometimes an issue from people working on enterprise systems with enormous amounts of complex code written in a language where “there’s more than one way to do it” and everyone might have their own way.

I’ve always liked Perl since I started working with it in 2002 but all my recent development work has been in PHP. If I look beyond PHP for something else, I think the dramatic changes in Perl from 5 to 6 make the switching costs that much lower because the new version pushes me down the learning curve anyway.

I can see both sides expressed in this article [excerpted below in single quotes]:

‘It seems every day I am questioned about why I write in Perl versus PHP, Java, C#, Ruby, Python, or [insert your favorite language here]. People say things like, “Perl isn’t used anymore is it?” or, “Ruby on Rails is all I read about anymore.”

[…]

Perl is, in fact, alive and thriving, and it is uniquely suited to a variety of programming projects with its flexibility, power, and extensive code base. I write in Perl because it provides everything needed to support enterprise software applications. I write in Perl because it is actively being maintained and developed. I write in Perl because nothing else gets the job done better: long live Perl.’

For my small-scale development needs I’m betting that at this point something gets the job done better. For now, anyway, pelicans have no need for Perl.