October 15th, 2025
Perl is my favorite language, and I use it for everything. At work I often get questions like, "why do you use Perl?", or "Perl seems cool, but isn't it super old?". This is an all inclusive guide to why Perl rocks, and why I use it in 2025 to solve real-world problems.
Perl is fun by default. It's a language jam-packed with flavor and culture, it oozes charm and doesn't really care what you think of it. I like to think of Perl as a cathedral (perhaps as to why we have Perl Monks?), sure it's old, mostly underfunded and losing its time in the spotlight, but its masonry was built by such dedicated and whimsical craftspeople, that it will continue to stand, like a monolith to the past for years and years to come. Perl will continue to work in its own eclectic way long after the newly constructed churches of current-time have collapsed. You can't build something like Perl anymore, the ways of olde are long gone. That's why I love Perl, it's unapologetically itself, and it will continue to power thousands of systems world-wide, long into the future. Perhaps we could all learn a thing or two about being like that.
Technically speaking, I can write robust code that performs well, without the abuse of a type-checker, or the utopianism of a language ideology (ie. FP or OOP). Is it procedural, is it object-oriented, is it functional, no. It's Perl. It can be whatever you, or your team want it to be, and that's pretty cool. I usually use a mixture of all paradigms within a Perl codebase, based on the problem at hand. Perl has a unique motto, easy things should feel be easy, and hard things should feel be possible. I like to think a lot about how I feel when I write code, when I write Java I feel sort of bored, and problems are almost just rocks to jump over, when I write Perl I feel as if the roof is removed from the house, and I have freedom to approach the problem however I'd like. Finally, when I have to upgrade a Perl project, no matter its age I can rest assured that it will work, and continue to work. Some people call this stagnation, I like to think of it as standardization, there will be no Perl version of the Python 2.7 -> Python 3, or Scala 2 -> Scala 3, Perl doesn't want to change itself, why would it? The language as I explained before, is comfortable in its own skin.
At the end of the day, Perl is a fast, developer oriented language that feels like rocket science. It is incredibly fun to work with, and allows developers to express themselves with simple constructs, in a way no other language (except maybe Raku) allows. Through my ~10 years of development experience, Perl has been my go to since the beginning. I've used many languages professionally, and casually, and none have brought me the joy that Perl has.
My current company: Mollusc Software Solutions Inc. is an exclusively Perl oriented business. We have a few modern web applications we support that are written using Perl. SlapbirdAPM (Mojolicious, DBI, et al) and SimplExpense (Plack, Kelp, DBI, et al). Perl is used for everything at Mollusc, we write one-off scripts, web applications, data tasks, etc all in Perl. Also, we orchestrate our containers using a simple Perl-based tool that we're planning to open-source at some point.
Outside of Mollusc, I have a contract with a sector of the Federal Government of Canada, working in DevOps. This puts me within close access of a lot of UNIX servers, all of which have Perl. I use Perl at this job to 1. bug my co-workers, and 2. quickly solve text, administration, and one-off problems quickly.
Perl is a great language you can use it for great fun, and great profit. It performs well and is suitable for most tasks you'll run into in 2025. If you're getting bored of your current goto language, and are looking for a fun language to satiate you for the next 10 years, Perl is probably one of your best bets. If you're a manager looking to start a greenfield project, and are worried about finding talent, Perl has a ton of extremely talented individuals (*cough* *cough*) who are always looking for new/existing Perl projects.