It seems every day I get a question about why WebGUI is written in Perl vs PHP, Java, C#, Ruby, Python, or [insert your favorite language here]. People say things like "Perl isn't used anymore is it?" or "Ruby on Rails is all I read about anymore."

Let's say for a second that Perl actually were dead or dying. Even if that were true, it would be dying for dozens of years to come. The reason? Businesses have billions of dollars invested in Perl code that is not easily replaced. We're talking mission critical applications here. Not that I like the comparison, but people have been saying that Cobol has been dead for more than 20 years now, but there are over 1000 Cobol jobs per month posted on Monster.com, and more than 5000 per month for Perl.

The reality is that Perl is far from dead. There are millions of Perl programmers around the world. Perl 5 is being actively maintained, and Perl 6 is in development. More than 3000 Perl Modules were released in 2006 and we're on track to release double that this year.

In the past five years Perl's usage has grown by almost 700%, that's more than 100% per year. People then ask why it looks like Perl's market share is sliding. The answer is that they typically use web site development as a measurement of marketshare, and the percentage of the web that's programmed in Perl is shrinking. Is that due people not using Perl? No. Absolutely not. Instead it's just that there are more and more web sites and more and more programming language options. Ten years ago almost all of the web applications out there were either written in Perl or C, but since then dozens of new languages have caught on. In addition, there are an estimated 20 million new sites put up each year. Even though the number of sites created in Perl doubles every year tracking it by percentages will make the numbers seem to shrink.

Still don't believe me? Well, how about we examine a small swath of really big web sites that I'm sure you've heard of and used that are either built entirely on Perl, or have significant portions written in Perl: Yahoo!, Amazon, TicketMaster, The United States Department of State, The BBC, Slashdot, and Shopzilla. Have you heard of any of those? I thought so.

Now let's tackle the "Why Perl?" part of the equation. Perl was designed to be an ultra flexible text processing language. In fact PERL is an acronym meaning Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. What is the the Internet if it's not text? Nearly every protocol and document standard you interact with on the web is just text. HTML, HTTP, SMTP, XML, CSS, Javascript? That's right, all text! So why not choose a programming language that was designed specifically for text processing when you're working on the Internet? Java and C# are designed to be generic do everything languages. PHP, ASP, Cold Fusion, and JSP are all designed for the Web only...and we work with other Internet technologies as well. And Ruby and Python are both good choices, but they don't have nearly as big of library of code as Perl does, and neither got popular until after WebGUI had already established itself as a contender.

The next time someone asks you "Why Perl?", now you know, and you can tell them.