I manage a CRM written entirely in Perl. Lots of new reports and new ways of accessing and managing the data are written each day.

It also doubles as an affiliate network and campaign/content management system, so you can create your offers, track traffic and pixels, and manage your leads and customers all in one place ... all in Perl. So, to me, Perl is far from dead. And, it is also far from "maintenance mode" as new functionality and code is constantly added.

I agree that there is still a lot to learn about Perl, and I constantly find myself developing new ways of streamlining existing code, making it more efficient as traffic demands ...

One other thing -- Perl pie! I can't even begin to tell you how often I use that ... And then there's the piping between awk and Perl going on for various system monitoring ...

The title had me worried. As a user, not a coder of perl, I wish there was more of it out there. The perl tools I bought years ago still do just what they are supposed to do and are easy to tweak with settings. Perl does not seem to be so littered with instant experts pushing broken toys (Just look at the thousands of me-too WordPress plugins). Maybe I have just been lucky, but I truly appreciate the work of perl programmers out there! Long live perl!

If there were no Perl we would have to call the PCRE something else, and then the world would end.

Perl is far from dead.

I could talk about the many things I have implemented on my latest CMS and it would sound as I'm trying to sell a magical solution here. It just works for may diff scenarios including clients, crm-ticket-system, contacts, reservations, scheduled posts and publications, multi store inventories, even daily, weekly and monthly backups including keeping an updated backup server with everything ready in case server A crashes, and also backup to other places.

Have you seen webmasters struggling with settings, configurations and database issues while they move to another server? I'm not there any more, Perl allowed me a one install of the CMS with full multi site applications and full drag and drop, I mean, I just pack and go, no config needed ever. And when in need to modify some script or add some new feature I just have to update a single file, not one per site.

I even have implemented special cache features for both desktop versions and mobile versions of the sites. It's been a never ending adventure. Still remember when I was researching Perl and discussions about flat file systems vs full databases, most people told me my personal choice was wrong, well this thing is fast! I'm off databases. When MYSQL service goes down the sites won't work, my sites still go on.

Always try my best to stay away from special plugins, modules, etc. Always looking for ways to do things with just code so I'm worried free about what's on the server I'm moving in. Other than that I had to write some scripts to migrate 5 websites owned by the company I work for to get all that content on Drupal. Not funny but Perl saved the day keeping the urls, images, etc.

Perl is everywhere on my applications, even use Perl on my desktop computer to deal with many tasks when in need.

Ok that's long enough.

Currently back playing with WXPerl. I continue to be fascinated with Perl GUI programming. I think I lost most of 2003 to PerlTK playing...

i'll have to look into wxperl - i haven't messed with that at all.

my "entry level drug" into perl and the web for that matter (about 15 years ago) was an application that used Tcl/Tk for the GUI.
the CGI scripts were written in Tcl.