Perl is not dead; It's Pot Roast

When I think of Perl I'm reminded of a Slow Cooker, in that it is what it says. Perl is Practical. Sometimes practicality takes time (hence the months and years between releases - Pot Roast takes time). Extraction and Reporting are self explanatory. Perl is a language.

According to Wikipedia:

Languages live, die, move from place to place and change with time. Any language that stops changing begins to die; any language that is a living language is a language in a state of continuous change.

When I look around at the various frameworks, existing expansions, continued development, community involvement, published works, plethora of jobs, news and evangelism I simply cannot see anything but a thriving language.

Critics have and will continue to have the debate whether Perl is alive or dead, but in the meantime, we continue to develop and innovate with Perl, ever so effortlessly adapting to the new "concept on the block".

Web Services, API's, frameworks, blogs (read the about page if you're wondering why I use Wordpress), social networking, scripting, etc. - Perl can do it all. Just like any other language.

Sure, competition and collaboration are great. They are what spawn new ideas and solutions. I'm reminded of the jQuery vs PrototypeJS war. jQuery pioneered the concept of using CSS selectors to get to DOM Elements. Brilliant. Now, these and many other libraries have that functionality. But it took time - like Pot Roast.