PERLS OF WISDOM

Programmers aren't so humble anymore. Maybe that's because they stopped coding in Perl.

- BY SAMUEL ARBESMAN

PERL WAS ONCE everywhere. Or at least it felt that way. Around the turn of the millennium, it seemed that almost every website was built on the back of this scripting language. It processed massive amounts of text—mechanisms for doing this powerfully and easily were part of the language—and it was even used in bioinformatics, munging and churning through genetic data. Based on one list, the companies that used Perl ranged widely: Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Deutsche Bank, Akamai, Citibank, Comcast, Morgan Stanley, Mozilla. A lot of Craigslist was programmed in Perl.

Even at its peak use, the popularity of Perl was always a bit surprising. Perl is an undeniably messy language. It's often referred to as the “duct tape of the internet,” with programmers joking that it's a “write-only” language: You write in it but seldom read it (at least successfully).