If you were building web applications during the first dot-com boom, chances are you wrote Perl. And if you're now a CTO, tech lead, or senior architect, you may instinctively steer teams away from it—even if you can’t quite explain why. This reflexive aversion isn’t just a preference. It’s what I call Dotcom Survivor Syndrome:
There were people unhappy with Perl before the Dotcom boom. I used Perl a lot, because the library ecosystem was enormous. There was a library for every esoteric thing and that was indeed great. But the language itself was never great. Sure the v6 situation didn’t help, but I think what ultimately killed Perl was the competition. Python in particular made it way more difficult to write code that, at best, only the original developer could read. That’s what you need to create a sustainable code base. And these days Python is still going strong, while I only sporadically think about Perl and never fondly.
There were people unhappy with Perl before the Dotcom boom. I used Perl a lot, because the library ecosystem was enormous. There was a library for every esoteric thing and that was indeed great. But the language itself was never great. Sure the v6 situation didn’t help, but I think what ultimately killed Perl was the competition. Python in particular made it way more difficult to write code that, at best, only the original developer could read. That’s what you need to create a sustainable code base. And these days Python is still going strong, while I only sporadically think about Perl and never fondly.