Is Perl worth learning in 2025?

Perl has been a powerful and flexible scripting language for decades, famous for its motto "There's more than one way to do it" (TMTOWTDI). As of 2025, whether Perl is worth learning depends on your goals, background, and the specific domain you want to work in.

Why Perl Still Matters in 2025

• Mature and Stable: Perl 5 continues to be actively maintained with improvements in performance and features (such as better Unicode support and post-5.10 syntax enhancements).
• Legacy Codebases: In many industries like bioinformatics, system administration, and network engineering, lots of legacy Perl scripts remain in production, meaning maintaining or extending them will require Perl knowledge.
• Text Processing Strength: Perl's regular expressions and text manipulation capabilities are still among the most concise and powerful, especially for rapid prototyping or ad hoc scripting.
• CPAN Ecosystem: The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network offers thousands of modules for almost any task, often leveraged in existing environments.

Considerations Against Learning Perl

• Growth of Other Languages: Python, JavaScript, and Rust have grown tremendously and are often preferred for new projects due to modern ecosystems and community momentum.
• Perceived Complexity: Perl's syntax and TMTOWTDI philosophy can be intimidating for beginners compared to more straightforward languages.
• Perl 6 / Raku Confusion: The introduction of Raku (originally Perl 6) created some fragmentation, which can confuse newcomers.

In Summary

If you plan to work in system scripting, bioinformatics, legacy web applications, or text-heavy automation, learning Perl is still valuable. For general-purpose programming or new projects, exploring newer languages like Python might be more productive. Furthermore, learning Perl can deepen your understanding of scripting, regex, and flexible language design, even if you don’t use it daily.

Perl Example: Simple Text Processing Script

This script demonstrates Perl’s expressive syntax for reading lines from standard input and printing lines that contain a number:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

print "Enter some lines of text (Ctrl+D to end):\n";

while (my $line = <STDIN>) {
    chomp $line;
    # Perl regex to search for digits in the line
    if ($line =~ /\d+/) {
        print "Line with number: $line\n";
    }
}

This example highlights several Perl-specific concepts:

• $line is a scalar variable (noted by $ sigil), holding a single string.
• The =~ binds a scalar variable to a regex match operation.
• Perl reads input line-by-line in a typical pipeline style.
• TMTOWTDI is evident since this could be done many other ways, demonstrating Perl’s flexibility.

Running this script and typing various lines will show how concise and effective Perl is for text-based filtering.

So yes, Perl is worth learning in 2025 if you value mature tools, strong text processing, and legacy system support, but it should be weighed against current language trends and your specific use cases.