Well House Consultants - as an independent training company - was founded on a bedrock of Perl. But there days, Perl is only one of a number of subjects we teach, and it's far from "The big cheese" of our topics.

You should NOT conclude that's because Perl is less used. Training courses tend to be busy when a language is growing, and be quiet when a language is big but stable in its use (people learn in the early days ...). And there are a lot of other people who have jumped on the Perl bandwagon since 1996 - from being just about the only provider of such courses, we have moved to being one of a number. And remember - we're especially set up for niches, and Perl moved on from being a niche long ago.

But IS Perl being used less? In many application areas, it's a far lower proportion of the market than it used to be. For web applications, PHP and Ruby (on Rails) are extremely well suited and popular. For researchers with large projects and data sets, a language such as Python fits more naturally. Projects have "grown up" and Python's natural maintainability and structure makes for far easier management that Perl's somewhat maverick setups and history allow. But Perl does gain / win - is still very much my personal language of choice and recommendation - for those short, sharp, projects that require rapid coding, you still cannot find anything better.

I can't answer the question as to whether Perl's being used less - whether the growth of all IT area has meant that there's just as much of it being written as there was 10 years ago, but it's now been overtaken in proportion by other languages.

I'm not alone in saying that I don't know as much as I would like about the Perl community - when and why it uses Perl in comparison to other languages, for example, so I support the large scale survey that's currently under way to learn more. I have completed the survey, and I encourage YOU to do so too.

Take survey: [here].

Thank you.

P.S. Survey background - [here]. Survey from 2007 / 2009 - see [here] (read the .pdf ;-) ). Our Perl courses - see [here].

(written 2010-05-27, updated 2010-06-02)

 P050 - Perl - General
  [3407] Perl - a quick reminder and revision. Test yourself! - (2011-08-26)
  [3332] DNA to Amino Acid - a sample Perl script - (2011-06-24)
  [3322] How much has Perl (and other languages) changed? - (2011-06-10)
  [3093] How many toilet rolls - hotel inventory and useage - (2010-12-18)
  [2971] Should the public sector compete with businesses? and other deep questions - (2010-09-26)
  [2825] Perl course - is it tailored to Linux, or Microsoft Windows? - (2010-06-25)
  [2736] Perl Course FAQ - (2010-04-23)
  [2504] Learning to program in ... - (2009-11-15)
  [2374] Lead characters on Perl variable names - (2009-08-24)
  [2242] So what is this thing called Perl that I keep harping on about? - (2009-06-15)
  [2228] Where do I start when writing a program? - (2009-06-11)
  [1897] Keeping on an even keel - (2008-11-21)
  [1750] Glorious (?) 12th August - what a Pe(a)rl! - (2008-08-12)
  [743] How to debug a Perl program - (2006-06-04)
  [400] New in the shops - (2005-08-01)
  [116] The next generation of programmer - (2004-11-13)

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Sleeping in on Sunday
Factory methods and SqLite in use in a Python teaching example
The Light bulb moment when people see how Object Orientation works in real use
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The Perl Survey
Tell the Melksham Chamber or you only have yourself to blame
The 500 pound question to get you started
Formatted Printing in Python
The history and future of Melksham Chamber of Commerce
Learning to program in Python 2 ... and / or in Python 3