dean

There has been much to say about Perl improving in TIOBE during 2025 and ending in the top 10 which is roughly where things were around 2016.

Many things are working well in the Perl community and we should expect to be seeing them paying off.

For example:

• The Perl Steering Committee is now several years in and is working effectively


• New releases continue their consistent, predictable, and reliable cadence


• Backward compatibility is still a priority, and breaks happen with care and ample warning.


• MetaCPAN and CPAN are being well run and attracting regular donations


• The Perl and Raku foundation continues in its mission. Continuing to run events and engage with the community


• Perl-centric events continue regularly in America, Europe, and Asia. New events have also sprung up with both in person and online attendance options


• Several grants are adding considerable value to the maintenance of Perl


• Perl continues to be maintained as an official package in every Linux distro, BSD, and is available for Windows. Perl continues to be very viable on a range of systems outside those, some commercial others proprietary


• The Perl langauge has excellent support in major editors/IDE such as Vscode (it is by far the most popular), Vim, Nevim, Emacs, IntelliJ and others.


• The various community channels are more helpful and friendly than ever.


• All major AI platforms can help you with Perl, which excellent results. Never has it been easier to decipher Perl code, to have something patiently explained, or to have detailed reviews of your code


• Perl critic and Perltidy are more relevant than ever in the age of AI. You can define a policy to automatically avoid many of Perls pitfalls and to ensure your code is formatted in a consistent way to suit your needs

Be skeptical of TIOBE by all means, but let's not grasp defeat from the jaws of victory.

Let's take the Win!

Edit: Mentioned events. Which deserve a mention.