by munificent | 2025-07-31 22:35:23+00:00
I think Perl died from a combination of three factors:

1. The rise of other web languages that did what Perl was good at but better.

Perl was probably a fine language for sysadmins doing some text munging. Then it became one of the first languages of the web thanks to Apache and mod_perl, but it was arguably never great at that. Once PHP, Python, Ruby, and (eventually) JavaScript showed up, Perl's significant deficiencies for large maintainable codebases made it very hard to compete.

In many cases, a new, better language can't outcompete an old entrenched one. The old language has an ecosystem and users really don't like rewriting programs, so that gives it a significant competitive advantage.

But during the early rise of the web, there was so much new code being written that that advantage evoporated. During the dot com boom, there were thousands of startups and millions of lines of brand new code being written. In that rare greenfield environment, newer languages had a more even playing field.

2. Perl 6 leaving its users behind.

As a language maintainer, I feel in my bones how intense the desire is to break with the past and Do Things Right This Time. And I'm maintaining a language (Dart) that is relatively new and wart-free compared to Perl. So I can't entirely blame Wall for treating Perl 6 as a blank check to try out every new idea under the sun.

But the problem is that the more changes you make to the language, the farther you pull away from your users and their programs. If they can't stay with you, you both die. They lose an active maintainer for the core tools they rely on. And you lose all of their labor building and maintaining the ecosystem of packages everyone relies on.

A racecar might go a lot faster if it jettisons all the weight of its fuel tank, but it's not going to faster for long.

I think the Perl 6 / Raku folks go so excited to make a new language that they forgot to bring their users with them. They ran ahead and left them behind.

3. A wildly dynamic language.

If you want to evolve a language and keep the ecosystem with you while you do it, then all of that code needs to be constantly migrated to the new language's syntax and semantics. Hand-migrating is nightmarishly costly. Look at Python 3.

It's much more tractable if you can do most of that migration automatically using tools. In order to do that, the tools need to be able to reason in detail about the semantics of a program just using static analysis. You can't rely on dynamic analysis (i.e. running the code and seeing what it does) because it's just not thorough enough to be safe to rely on for large-scale changes to source code.

Obviously, static types help a lot there. Perl 5 not only doesn't have those, but you can't even parse a Perl program without running Perl code. It is a fiendishly hard language to statically analyze and understand the semantics of.

So even if the Perl 6 folks wanted to bring the Perl 5 ecosystem with them, doing so would have been extremely challenging.

I would say this is a case study in a programming language tragedy, but I honestly don't even know if it's a bad thing. It may be that programming languages should have a life cycle that ends in them eventually being replaced entirely by different languages. Perhaps Perl's time had simply come.

I am grateful for all of the innovative work folks have done on Perl 6 and Raku. It's a cornucopia of interesting programming language ideas that other languages will be nibbling on for decades.