Only a few days after reading the article, “Perl is dead. Long live Perl!” on O’Reilly (JT’s Article on Perl), I met JT at the MadMongers meeting. MadMongers is the Perl users group in Madison, Wisconsin. Good timing!

Often, outsiders complain about the use of symbols in Perl. Perl regular expressions are notorious for this. While anyone can learn these representations, if you are new to Perl, some parts of code can look pretty Greek.

This has been followed by an amusing article on the awkward and confusing nature of English (Is it time to replace English for Code?). Or rather, the English comments accompanying Perl code are more to blame than the code itself.

In my experience, the symbolics in Perl are not a hindrance to new users. In fact, Perl is so accessible to novices that it is easy to wind up with very bad scripts. Almost anyone can write a simple Perl script and very often people claim the title “Perl programmer” with very little experience.

JT Smith has been called an “unsung hero of using Perl in business” for his company’s successful WebGui product. Since Perl is a big part of the OpenMake Software product line, I think we deserve some credit as well. If not “unsung heroes” because our products use C and Java as well, then perhaps “unsung sidekicks.”

Rest assured Perl is alive and well and expanding and becoming more useful every day. I subscribe to the CPAN updates on use.perl.org and there are 15-30 Perl module updates daily. Just one indicator of activity. (And, unlike Java, there is automated community release management to keep dependencies straight.)