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Title: Is Perl the World's 10th Most Popular Programming Language?

Link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/09/1...

TIOBE attempts to calculate programming language popularity using the number
of skilled engineers, courses, and third-party vendors. And the eight most
popular languages in September's rankings haven't changed since last month:
1. Python 2. C++ 3. C 4. Java 5. C# 6. JavaScript 7. Visual Basic 8. Go But
by TIOBE's ranking, Perl is still the #10 most-popular programming in
September (dropping from #9 in August). "One year ago Perl was at position 27
and now it suddenly pops up at position 10 again," marvels TIOBE CEO Paul
Jansen. The technical reason why Perl is rated this high is because of its
huge number of books on Amazon. It has 4 times more books listed than for
instance PHP, or 7 times more books than Rust. The underlying "real" reason
for Perl's increase of popularity is unknown to me. The only possibility I
can think of is that Perl 5 is now gradually considered to become the real
Perl... Perl 6/Raku is at position 129 of the TIOBE index, thus playing no
role at all in the programming world. Perl 5 on the other hand is releasing
more often recently, thus gaining attention. An article at the i-Programmer
blog thinks Perl's resurgence could be from its text processing capabilities:
Even in this era of AI, everything is still governed by text formats; text is
still the King. XML, JSON calling APIs, YAML, Markdown, Log files..That means
that there's still need to process it, transform it, clean it, extract from
it. Perl with its first-class-citizen regular expressions, the wealth of text
manipulation libraries up on CPAN and its full Unicode support of all the
latest standards, was and is still the best. Simply there's no other that can
match Perl's text processing capabilities. They also cite Perl's backing by
the open source community, and its "getting a 'proper' OOP model in the last
couple of years... People just don't know what Perl is capable of and instead
prefer to be victims of FOMO ephemeral trends, chasing behind the new and
shiny." I'd be curious what Slashdot's readers say. (Share your experiences
in the comments if you're still using Perl -- or Raku...) Perl's drop to #9
means Delphi/Object Pascal rises up one rank, growing from 1.82% in August to
2.26% in September to claim September's #9 spot. "At number 11 and 1.86%, SQL
is quite close to entering the top 10 again," notes TechRepublic. (SQL fell
to #12 in June, which the site speculated was due to "the increased use of
NoSQL databases for AI applications." But TechRepublic adds that the #1 most
popular programming language (according to TIOBE) is still Python: Perl sits
at 2.03% in TIOBE�(TM)s proprietary ranking system in September, up from
0.64% in January. Last year, Perl held the 27th position... Python�(TM)s
unstoppable rise dipped slightly from 26.14% in August to 25.98% in
September. Python is still well ahead of every other language on the index.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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