I wrote code for a bank using perl. I'd say 95% of their code at the time was in perl. Website called perl, back-end processing was perl scripts. Cron jobs were all perl script that needed to run to do house-keeping.
Fun fact: the majority of the Amazon.com home page is/was written in Perl (Mason). It's slowly being re-written in JVM languages, but I'd bet that some portion of the rendered HTML will come from Perl for a very long time.
I personally really like Perl. It does kinda encourage code-golfing, but that's what makes it so nice for one-off scripts.
Useless trivia. Perl was doing unit testing back in the mid-80s. One of Perl's early selling points was how portable they were, and the fact that they had comprehensive unit tests so long before the rest of the industry realized that was a good idea is one of the reasons for it.
More like that they invented a simple test protocol, called TAP. It's slow, because perl runs it, but you can also emit tap from C or C++, and it's much easier and more flexible than dejagnu or other low-level test frameworks.
It wasn't just a test protocol. Perl 1 came with a test suite, which its Makefile ran by default before installation.
As Perl grew up, the idea of "you have tests for at least basic stuff" was built into the culture. For example back in the mid-90s it was expected that every module came with a test suite, and every site would run that test suite before installing the module. When you went to package something for CPAN, you were expected to have a ./t directory with tests, and there were lots of examples to show you how to do it. And automated scripts that expected you do to it.
It was something like 15 years before anyone thought of naming the test protocol. It was just how you did things.
"Wall and his wife were studying linguistics with the intention of finding an unwritten language, perhaps in Africa, and creating a writing system for it"
90% of the stuff I write is in Perl. The other 10% is Tcl.
I design semiconductors and every week I have to write a couple of small scripts to process text files or reports and that is always in Perl. Everyone at work knows Perl. Those that don't learn it.
The EDA tools mostly use Tcl as the internal scripting language so I have to use that.
I have no problem with new languages but I find regex's in other languages to be too verbose.
I have used Perl extensively in all of my last 4 jobs. The biggest reason companies that use Perl (that I am familar with) are looking at other languages is because it is hard to find developers.
I wrote code for a bank using perl. I'd say 95% of their code at the time was in perl. Website called perl, back-end processing was perl scripts. Cron jobs were all perl script that needed to run to do house-keeping.