I came across this old thread about Perl and thought it was worth revisiting. Back then, folks were comparing it to PHP and wondering why it wasn’t as popular. Fast forward to 2026, and Perl is still quietly humming along in production environments—especially in sysadmin, bioinformatics, and legacy systems. Sure, CGI is long dead, but PSGI/Plack modernized Perl web development. The real killer feature remains CPAN: over 200,000 modules for everything from PDF generation to machine learning.
If you’re on Windows, Strawberry Perl is the way to go now—ActivePerl is still around but less common. And let’s not forget Raku (formerly Perl 6), which is a separate language but carries the spirit forward. So, what’s your take? Is Perl still worth learning in 2026, or is it purely maintenance?
Here’s a quick modern Perl snippet for fetching a webpage:
use strict;
use warnings;
use Mojo::UserAgent;
my $ua = Mojo::UserAgent->new;
my $res = $ua->get('https://example.com')->result;
if ($res->is_success) {
print $res->body;
}
Topic Summary: Perl remains quietly essential in 2026 for sysadmin, bioinformatics, and legacy systems, powered by CPAN’s 200k+ modules and modernized via PSGI/Plack. Strawberry Perl is now standard on Windows
Featured GitHub Resource:
major/MySQLTuner-perl - MySQLTuner is a script written in Perl that will assist you with your MySQL configuration and make recommendations for increased performance and st… (★ 9470)
Topic Overview (Wikipedia):
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including “Practical Extraction and Reporting Language”.
— Read more on Wikipedia
Great points, Alex. I use Perl daily for log parsing and system monitoring. The one-liner culture is still unmatched—try doing perl -ne 'print if /error/' in Python without importing sys. In DevOps, Perl’s text processing is a secret weapon. CPAN also has excellent modules for AWS and Docker APIs, so it’s not stuck in the past.
That said, I wouldn’t recommend it for new greenfield projects unless you have a specific need—Python and Go have broader ecosystems. But for glue code and automation, Perl is still king. And yes, Strawberry Perl is the standard on Windows now; ActiveState’s shift to a commercial model turned a lot of people off.
I learned Perl a few years back when I had to maintain an old ticket system. Honestly, it felt alien at first—sigils, context, and TIMTOWTDI (There Is More Than One Way To Do It) can be overwhelming. But once I got past the learning curve, I appreciated the expressiveness. For web dev, I’d still pick something like Django or Rails for a team project, but for a quick script that processes a CSV and sends an email? Perl gets out of your way.
Also, shout out to Mojolicious for modern web apps—it’s lightweight and fun. If you’re curious, start with perlbrew to manage multiple versions. And don’t forget to use strict; use warnings; from day one!
I think this thread captures the Perl mood pretty well—it’s not the flashy language of the year, but it’s still a workhorse. One thing I want to underscore is how Perl has quietly adapted to modern infrastructure. The PSGI/Plack ecosystem is solid, and Mojolicious has been getting steady updates. But the real story in 2026 is Perl 5.44.
At TPRC 2026, Karl Williamson gave a talk on what’s new, and it’s not just maintenance. We’re seeing better Unicode handling (finally), faster regex engine optimizations, and experimental support for native subroutine signatures without use feature 'signatures' being experimental anymore. The dev process is more agile now—point releases happen every few months, so the language isn’t stagnant.
For anyone new to Perl, don’t let the “dead language” meme fool you. The core use case—text processing, sysadmin glue, bioinformatics pipelines—is still where it shines. If you’re on Windows and using Strawberry Perl, you can even run MySQLTuner-perl (that script with nearly 10k stars) right out of the box to tune your database. That’s the kind of practical tooling that keeps Perl relevant under the hood.
If you’re learning purely for career growth, yes, Python and Go have more job postings. But if you want to be the person who can untangle legacy systems or write a one-liner that does in seconds what others script for hours, Perl is an excellent second or third language. And with CPAN, you’re never truly alone.
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