Internet people love to spray their feelings about everything under the sun at every passerby. Perl, being a programming language, is no exception. At the end of the day, all the sound and fury signifies nothing. While I've largely laid out my perspective on this subject here, I suspect it's not quite the engagement bait people crave. Here's some red meat.

The reality is that multi-bilion dollar businesses have been built on infinitely worse stacks than what modern perl brings to the table. What's your excuse, loser? Quit whining and build.

Sturgeon's Law applies to everything, programs, languages and their authors included. 90% of the time you will be driving your stack like you stole it until the wheels fall off, swatting flies with elephant guns, yak shaving and putting vault doors on crack houses. What matters is that you focus the 10% of time that you are "on" where it counts for your business.

You only have a limited amount of time on this earth, and much less where you are in the zone. It will almost never be a good use of that time learning the umpteenth new programming language beyond the bare minimum to get what you want done. So don't do it if you can avoid it.

There are many other areas in life where we engage in rational ignorance; your trade will be no exception. Learning things before you use them is a waste of time, because you will forget most of it. I've forgotten more math than most people ever learn.

Having written in more than 20 programming languages now, the feeling I have about all of them is the same.

• They all have footguns, and they're usually the useful part of the language.
• Some aspect of the build toolchain is so bad you nearly have an aneurysm.
• I retreat into writing SQL to escape the pain as much as possible. It's the actually superior/universal programming language, sorry to burst your bubble
• FFI and tools for building microservices are good enough you can use basically any other library in any other language if you need to.
• HTML/JS are the only user interface you should ever use aside from a TTY, everything else is worse, and you'll need it eventually anyways.

I reject the entire premise that lack of interest in a programming language ought to matter to anyone who isn't fishing for engagement on social media. Most people have no interest whatsoever in the so-last-millenium Newton-Rhapson method, and yet it's a core part of this LLM craze. Useful technology has a way of not dying. What is useful about perl will survive, and so will your programming career if you stick along for the ride.

Remember the craftsman's motto: Maintain > Repair > Replace. Your time would be better spent not whining on forums, and instead writing more documentation and unit tests. If you spend your free time on that stuff, I would advise you to do what the kids say, and "Touch Grass". Otherwise how are you gonna tell the kids to get off your damned lawn?

Why all companies eventually decide to switch to the new hotness

You can show management the repeated case studies that:

• switching programming languages is always such a time-consuming disaster they lose significant market share (forgetting features, falling behind competitors)
• Statistically significant differences in project failure rate at firms is independent of the programming languages used

it bounces off them for two reasons:

1. Corn-Pone opinions. Naturally managers are predisposed to bigger projects & responsibilities, as that's the path onward and upwards.
2. "Senior" developers who know little about the existing tech stack, and rationally prefer to work on what they are familiar with.

The discerning among you are probably thinking "Aha! What if you have enough TOP MEN that know what's up?" This is in fact the core of the actual problem at the firm: turnover. They wouldn't even consider switching if those folks were still there.

They could vertically integrate a pipeline to train new employees to extend their lease on life, but that's quite unfashionable these days. In general that consists of:

• University Partnerships
• Robust paid modding scenes
• The Tech -> QA -> Dev pipeline

The first is a pure cost center, the second also births competitors, and the third relies on hiring overqualified people as techs/QAs. Not exactly a fun sell to shareholders who want profit now, a C-level that has levered the firm to the point there is no wiggle room, and managers who would rather "milk the plant" and get a promotion than be a hero and get run over.

This should come as no shock. The immediate costs are why most firms eschew vertical integration. However, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Some things are too important to leave to chance, and unfortunately this is one of them.

Ultimately, the organization, like all others before it, at some point succumbs to either age or the usual corporate pathologies which result in bouts of extreme turnover. This is the curse of all mature programming languages and organizations. Man and his works are mortal; we all pay the wages of our sins.

Conclusion

This "Ain't your grandpappy's perl", and it can't be. It's only as good as we who use perl are. Strap in, you are playing calvinball. Regardless of which language you choose, whether you like it or not, you are stuck in this game. It's entirely your choice whether it is fun and productive, or it is a grave.