I heard a fascinating theory a few years ago on the decline of Perl:

In the early aughts, Google SRE recruiting had such a strong, selective focus on A-player sysadmins with Perl expertise that it drained the market of top talent. Within google these people began to adopt, and eventually create and evangelize newer, Googlier programming languages.

In other words, Perl expertise was the skills filter, and Perl itself a technological ancestor of certain modern languages like Go.

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maxlybbert 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don’t think Google was ever a Perl shop. eBay and Amazon were, apparently. Netscape wrote Bugzilla in Perl. I’m sure there were others.

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spudlyo 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I worked at Booking.com for a year or so around 10 years or so, and most of their stack was in Perl. Folks there had mixed feelings about it, I'm not sure what things are like now, but I assume they're working to replace it.

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		[deleted]

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steveklabnik 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

IMDB is the one I always think of.

	▲	colinstrickland 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		chunks of Amazon were still in Perl while we were building out IMDb.

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darrenf 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yahoo! had a shitload of Perl.

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hn_acc1 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Ah yes, that's it. I had to hack on Bugzilla to customize it for our start-up.. Back in the day BEFORE they added a lot of end-user customization... UGH..

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rurban 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Nonsense. Google only ever hired one perl5 committer, who never actually committed anything.