Perl missed out on the hype-bubble of the web 2.0 craze which shot Python and Ruby to the top of the charts in the early/mid 2000's. But it wouldn't surprise me if Perl was "rediscovered" at some point sort of like how JavaScript has experienced a renaissance since Node and the much-improved runtime engines showed up.
Personally, I have done a little work in Perl, but I never really considered it as tool I would want to build a large app using. I have always argued however that Perl is an ideal replacement for shell scripts and I have wondered for awhile what an interpreter shell would feel like if it used Perl as the language rather than say Bash.
given the relatively small number of new programmers is an actual advantage for us: increased salaries. i don't know the actual reason why, but we have students who, after 3-4 weeks of perl training are thrown in production environment where they fix bugs and implement features on par with our senior devs. It might be because they are very smart, or because the language is actually simpler to learn than it looks at first sight. And the production environment that I'm talking about is a very complex web app from an architectural point of view: it has mysql, memcached, the authorization of documents is done through sphinx search engine, we're using dbix class as an orm and catalyst as a web framework, etc
In any case, we use Perl heavily at Craigslist and are helping to sponsor the continued work on Perl6. I don't think it's nearly as bad as people seem to think. But time will tell, of course.
Yeah, basically there are 100k+ users in DB and 800k+ documents. Each document is filed under one or more geographies and one or more industries. Each user is entitled to access one or more geographies with one or more services. The SQL queries, besides that they have very complex where clauses, are very slow.
We use sphinx by indexing those documents, and attaching the geographies and industries as tags to each document. Whenever a user logs in, it takes only a few hundreds of miliseconds to get the latest documents he needs to see
That's always been true, throughout the rise of PHP, Python, and Ruby. Now, Python is as widely available (actually moreso, if you're primarily considering the major Linux distributions, where many of the system tools are in Python).
That is definitely not a killer feature, if it ever was one.
I'm a Perl developer, who also spent a few years working primarily in Python. But, I currently don't see anything that could flip that switch. Perl 6 might have helped seven, maybe even three or four, years ago. Or, a Perl 5 that didn't stop nearly completely for nearly a decade might have helped.
I see some great things happening in Perl 5 development; it's spun up again in the past few years, and Perl 5.20 is going to be a great release with significant improvements that have been a long time coming. But, no one except Perl programmers are paying attention to new features in Perl 5. Even Perl 6, as incredibly interesting and novel as it is, doesn't really garner much interest anymore, except a brief, "Oh, is it done yet?"
I still find Perl extremely productive. Many of the elements people complain about are merely matters of taste (and I prefer the Perl way about as often as I prefer the Python way). But, even I can't see how Perl could become the new hotness again.
I'm becoming an oldtimer in this field, as well...not quite a greybeard, but my beard has some grey. And, most of the Perl conferences and meetups are populated by folks even older than me. That's no way grow a popular language.
Personally, I have done a little work in Perl, but I never really considered it as tool I would want to build a large app using. I have always argued however that Perl is an ideal replacement for shell scripts and I have wondered for awhile what an interpreter shell would feel like if it used Perl as the language rather than say Bash.