Perl's Decline Was Cultural

Summary

According to the Discourse, somebody killed perlThere's been a flurry of discussion on Hacker News and other tech forums about what killed Perl. I wrote a lot of Perl in the mid 90s and subsequently worked on some of the most trafficked sites on the web in mod_perl in the early 2000s, so I have some thoughts. My take: it was mostly baked into the culture. Perl grew amongst a reactionary community with conservative values, which prevented it from evolving into a mature general purpose language ecosystem. Everything else filled the gap. I remember PerlSomething to keep in mind, is that although this is my personal take, and therefore entirely an opinion piece, I was there at the time. I stopped doing Perl properly when I left Amazon, I think this would have been around 2005. It's based on the first hand impressions of somebody who was very deeply involved in Perl in its heyday, and moved on. I have a lot of experience, from both inside and outside the tent. Perl's roots are sysadminWhat culture? Perl always had a significant amount of what you might call "BOFH" culture, which came from its old UNIX sysadmin roots. All of those passive aggressive idioms and in jokes like "RTFM", "lusers", "wizards", "asking for help the wrong way" etc. None of this is literally serious, but it does encode and inform social norms that are essentially tribal and introverted. There implicitly is a privileged population, with a cost of entry to join. Dues must be paid. Cultural conservatism as a first principle. This stems from the old locked-down data centre command culture. When computer resource was expensive, centralised, fragile, and manually operated, it was rigidly maintained by gatekeepers, defending against inappropriate use. I started my career as an apprentice programmer at the very end of this era, (late 80s) pre-web, and before microcomputers had made much inroads, and this really was the prevailing view from inside the fort. (This is a drawback about fort-building. Once you l...