> I don’t love Perl, but we have 10+ year old Perl scripts at work that work fine.
I'm not talking primarily about Perl as a technology in and of itself, but as a long-term technology choice in terms of being able to find people to maintain and improve it.
The Xen Project has a bunch of support stuff (automated testing and tooling around doing security work) written Perl. It was just about a reasonable decision when it started to be written 10-15 years ago; Golang was too young, Rust wasn't written yet, and Python had its downsides. But when the author of the code left the project 2-3 years ago, and there was 1) nobody with a similar level of expertise to maintain it, 2) nobody particularly wanted to gain that expertise, and 3) it wasn't easy to find someone else to pay to do maintenance.
If you've managed to find people who can maintain those perl scripts, more power to you; but it unless perl5 can get some momentum back, it seems like it's going to be harder and harder to find replacements.
The thing about Perl developers is they tend to stick around. At the last Perl shop I worked for, the average employment time must have exceeded 10 years. I could say the same of Prolog and 25 year average employments.
I'm not talking primarily about Perl as a technology in and of itself, but as a long-term technology choice in terms of being able to find people to maintain and improve it.
The Xen Project has a bunch of support stuff (automated testing and tooling around doing security work) written Perl. It was just about a reasonable decision when it started to be written 10-15 years ago; Golang was too young, Rust wasn't written yet, and Python had its downsides. But when the author of the code left the project 2-3 years ago, and there was 1) nobody with a similar level of expertise to maintain it, 2) nobody particularly wanted to gain that expertise, and 3) it wasn't easy to find someone else to pay to do maintenance.
If you've managed to find people who can maintain those perl scripts, more power to you; but it unless perl5 can get some momentum back, it seems like it's going to be harder and harder to find replacements.