Late to the Party: Death of Perl?

Death of Perl?

cwilliams — Fri, 08 Jul 2005 22:58:21 +0000

Given the news about Ruby and YARV, the Ruby community and the language’s vitality stand in stark contrast to some of the news surrounding the Perl community. If you take a look at O’Reilly’s graphic of relative programming language book sales, you’ll notice that Perl stands ahead of Python and Ruby (even .NET). So given the latest developments with Dan Sugalski, and the relatively long release time of Perl 6, I’m curious as to whether Perl developers will flock Ruby’s way. If you take a look at the trends that O'Reilly mentions, he notes that a few years ago the Python book market was 1/6 that of Perl. Now it’s 2/3. So there’s an obvious shift from Perl to Python. The question is: Why? Ruby would seem to be a better fit.

Obviously it would be a loss for scripting languages if all they can manage to do is to cannibalize market- and mind-share from one another. The real question and trend to look out for is the move from Java, C, C++ or C#. I don’t think that move will come all too quickly. Perhaps Visual Basic though…

Maybe, I’m overstating Perl’s demise anyhow. They did just release Parrot 0.2.2, and there’s a Perl 6 implementation underway in Haskell.

"Death of Perl?" by chromatic

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 06:09:01 +0000

I believe the numbers Tim uses come from Bookscan figures for the 3000 best selling technical books.

"Death of Perl?" by Chris

Fri, 22 Jul 2005 13:35:24 +0000

Well, it is true that O'Reilly has only published Ruby in a Nutshell - which was a bit before Ruby became a hotter language. So I'm curious if the trends only include O'Reilly published title, or all Ruby related books sold through O'Reilly's site? Obviously the best book to use as an indicator would be the Pragmatic Programmers', but I'd assume most people buy them more or less directly from Dave and Andy. So I think your point does stand that most people are unlikely to buy an O'Reilly Ruby book. (And Dave and Andy don't have Java/Python/C# etc titles to compare against. Not to mention they're actively involved in the Ruby community - so it'd likely bias the Ruby numbers up). What would be a better indicator of user-base of a language? or of mindshare? or corporate adoption? Job listings? I think this would work for languages once they've entered the mainstream, or at least as a gauge of where they are in the lifecycle (early adopter vs mainstream). But how do we truly measure languages on the leading edge of the uptake curve?

"Death of Perl?" by Scott Laird

Thu, 21 Jul 2005 21:21:02 +0000

I'm a little irritated by the Ruby line on O'Reilly's chart. They only sell one Ruby book, and it's ancient. It was never very popular within the Ruby community, *even though* the book was written by Ruby's primary developer. So, the fact that Ruby has this little line that keeps bouncing off the bottom of the chart is really more of an indication that O'Reilly doesn't produce any salable Ruby books, not an indicator of the market size.