Is Perl still relevant in 2025?

Perl has been a powerhouse in the programming world since the late 1980s, known for its powerful text processing capabilities, flexibility, and motto "There's more than one way to do it" (TMTOWTDI). The question of whether Perl remains relevant in 2025 is nuanced and depends on various factors such as project requirements, ecosystem maturity, and developer preferences.

Is Perl Still Relevant in 2025?

Yes, Perl is still relevant in 2025, though its role has evolved compared to its heyday. Here are some key points to consider:

• Legacy and Maintenance: Many large codebases and scripts, especially in system administration, bioinformatics, finance, and text processing, still rely on Perl. Organizations continue to maintain and extend these systems, ensuring Perl's ongoing relevance.
• CPAN Ecosystem: Perl’s Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) remains one of the richest repositories of reusable modules. This ecosystem allows rapid development in many specialized areas, sometimes outperforming newer languages in niche domains.
• Modern Features: Perl 5 has evolved steadily, introducing features like signatures (Perl 5.20+), defined-or operator `//` (5.10+), postderef (5.20+), and improvements to regular expressions. Perl 7 is on the horizon, aiming to modernize defaults while retaining backward compatibility.
• Context Sensitivity and Expressiveness: Perl’s context-driven behavior (scalar vs list context) offers unique expressive power. Experienced Perl programmers can write concise yet powerful scripts for data munging, system automation, and report generation.
• Competition: Newer languages like Python, Ruby, and JavaScript have gained popularity for web development, machine learning, and general-purpose scripting. These often come with more beginner-friendly syntax and larger communities.
• Community and Support: The Perl community is smaller compared to mainstream languages but still active. Learning resources, forums, and CPAN continue to support Perl development.

In summary, Perl remains relevant particularly for:

• Maintaining and extending legacy code
• Complex text and regex-heavy tasks
• Rapid prototyping for system scripts
• Use cases where CPAN modules excel

While it may not be the default choice for new large-scale web or AI projects, it remains a valuable tool in many programmers' toolboxes in 2025.

Perl Example: Demonstrating Context and Text Processing

This simple example highlights Perl’s ability to handle scalar and list context differently, along with regular expression capabilities—a major reason for Perl’s long-standing utility.

use strict;
use warnings;

# Sample input string with words and numbers:
my $input = "Perl 5, Perl 7, and Perl 6 (Raku)";

# In scalar context, split returns number of fields:
my $count = split /,?\s+/, $input;

print "Number of fields found: $count\n";

# In list context, split returns list of fields:
my @fields = split /,?\s+/, $input;

print "Fields:\n";
foreach my $field (@fields) {
    # Extract word 'Perl' and version number using regex
    if ($field =~ /(Perl) (\d+)/) {
        print "Found $1 version $2\n";
    } else {
        print "Other field: $field\n";
    }
}

Explanation:

• The split function behaves differently depending on context: scalar context returns the count, list context returns the actual elements. Understanding context is a uniquely Perl trait.
• Regex matching is expressive and concise; the example pulls out 'Perl' versions from text easily.
• Using strict and warnings is a best practice to catch common pitfalls.

Run this script using perl <filename> to see how Perl's context sensitivity and regex handling make it a versatile language for text processing — a core use case where Perl is still very much relevant.