Is anyone using Perl?

Perl remains a vibrant and widely used programming language, especially in domains like system administration, text processing, bioinformatics, and legacy application maintenance. While newer languages often steal the spotlight, Perl's strengths in rapid scripting, regex integration, and text manipulation keep it relevant for many developers and organizations.

One reason Perl endures is its famous motto: TMTOWTDI ("There's More Than One Way To Do It"). This flexibility allows developers to choose the style they prefer—procedural, object-oriented, functional, or a blend—depending on the problem at hand. Furthermore, Perl's powerful regex engine baked into the core language is still among the best for complex pattern matching and text munging tasks.

Perl 5 continues to receive maintenance and feature updates (notably versions post 5.10 introduced say(), smart match, and state variables), and Perl 7 is emerging to modernize defaults and usability without breaking backwards compatibility.

Here are some key points regarding Perl usage today:

• Legacy codebase support: Many organizations rely heavily on existing Perl scripts for automation and data parsing.
• System scripting: Perl excels in writing concise one-liners and robust scripts for sysadmins.
• Bioinformatics and data science: CPAN hosts many specialized modules used in research fields.
• Web development: Frameworks like Dancer and Mojolicious keep modern Perl web apps well supported.

To demonstrate a simple Perl program that prints "Is anyone using Perl? Yes, I am!" you can run the following code. This example shows basic Perl syntax, the use of the say function (5.10+), and sigils for string literals:

use strict;
use warnings;
use feature 'say';

# A simple Perl script to affirm usage of Perl

my $question = "Is anyone using Perl?";
say $question;

# Respond affirmatively
say "Yes, I am!";

Explanation:

• use strict; and use warnings; help catch common errors and enforce good coding practice.
• use feature 'say'; enables the say function — an enhanced version of print that adds a newline automatically, introduced in Perl 5.10.
• $question is a scalar variable (indicated by the $ sigil) holding a string.
• The script prints two lines to STDOUT, demonstrating straightforward output.

In summary, Perl is definitely “still in use,” and its blend of power, expressiveness, and an extensive module ecosystem make it a great tool for many practical tasks. Whether you’re maintaining old scripts or building new automation, Perl’s community and capabilities remain strong.