I would not consider myself a perl advocate. I don't run around proselytizing about the wonderfulness of Perl. However, occasionally, someone will say something profoundly silly. Today, once again, I have heard the ridiculous claim that, "Perl is not a serious language." What the speaker typically means is that no real system could possibly be built using a toy language such as Perl. Since I have been building serious systems with Perl for the last 10 years I know that this claim is false. These days I simply laugh at the claim and go about my business.

Where I work we recently completed a large and lengthy project to re-architect our core technology. The entire project was written in Perl. The webserver on the frontend? Written in Perl. The servers making the business decisions? Written in Perl. The backend that serves up the data? Written in perl. This is a web service that receives millions of hits per day. Nearly every hit requires a fairly complex and unique set of rules to be followed. The whole thing was written in Perl.

To say that Perl is a toy is simply wrong.

I actually wrote my first Perl program when I was working for a company owned and operated by Texas Instruments. That was in 1997. However my job hardly revolved around Perl and I mostly wrote code in Tcl/Tk, C and a small amount of C++. It was in 2000 that I moved to San Mateo, California to work for a startup company named Zack Networks (deceased) that I began writing Perl code for a living. Over the last ten years I have written PHP, C, Python, and (a very small amount of) Java code. However the lion's share of what I have written has been in Perl.

I wonder how long my 'relationship' with Perl can last. Some say that Perl is losing its edge or losing its mindshare. Others think that Perl 6 will revolutionize and reinvigorate what they see as a community stuck in a rut. Maybe. Maybe not. Frankly I'm impressed that it has lasted this long. I'm not impressed because I think Perl is a poor product, but because I think the pace of technological change can be so swift that once mighty technologies are suddenly obsolete (I will concede that this tends to happen more slowly to programming languages). I don't know if my next 10 years will include Perl as much as this past 10 years, but I certainly hope that it does.