107 engineers on Hacker News describe using Perl first-hand: 15 endorse it, 24 regret it, 10 are mixed.
“I moved to Python when installing some dependencies became troublesome and Perl versioning was not compatible”
regret · personal · gogasca · 2025-12-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'm an occasional and bad Perl dev like me... But I would still be grateful of what it brought”
mixed · personal · kakwa_ · 2025-11-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I fought cpan for two days trying to get anything to work.”
regret · production · pragmatic · 2025-11-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“still runs extremely well, fast and reliably in production”
mixed · production · ojosilva · 2025-11-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I took a job in Perl in 2017 and set about learning it and found its community to be the most snobbish and unfriendly of any programming subcommunity”
regret · production · windowshopping · 2025-11-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Perl can be very well written. I deeply regret not encountering Perl Best Practices when it came out.”
endorse · production · cafard · 2025-11-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it was the first one I wrote professionally, but never again.”
mixed · production · stouset · 2025-07-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have done a lot of things with Perl and know it well... I have caught myself writing clever code only to come back years later to regret it.”
regret · personal · temporallobe · 2024-12-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“When I was stuck inside a "big ball of perl" codebase that heavily used assertions for method input validation”
regret · production · drzaiusx11 · 2024-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“a small orchestration thing we have been using since the 90s (written in perl) (before compose we had our own compose-like with chroot). No issues. For decades.”
endorse · production · anonzzzies · 2024-11-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we've replaced production python and perl systems with Go.”
regret · production · sethammons · 2024-02-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“About the year 2000, I wrote a web app in Perl that used a file-based hash as a database. This solution worked quite well for more than 20 years.”
endorse · production · 20 yr · forinti · 2023-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using it in production for most of my critical services since about 2012. I've used many other languages since then but always keep coming back to perl.”
endorse · production · 10 yr · jb1991 · 2022-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“a big chunk of my programming career was working with Perl, and I've loved, used and advocated for Mojolicious”
endorse · production · dotandimet · 2022-06-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The first code base I worked on professionally was Perl. While I admire it's power I never got used to it.”
regret · production · 40acres · 2022-05-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“At work we have Perl in production that's well over two decades old”
mixed · production · 20 yr · kbenson · 2021-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I think perl is the king of this but I'm not going back to that... never again :)”
mixed · personal · stjohnswarts · 2021-11-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I now switch to using Perl when I get to the function stage”
endorse · personal · midasuni · 2021-10-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“modernizing a 20+ year old Perl project is a hellish undertaking at the best of times... but we keep going.”
regret · production · zorkian · 2020-07-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I had been pretty disenchanted with Perl as a whole due to the "there's more than one way to do it" culture”
regret · production · at_a_remove · 2020-06-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Usage of a runtime typed, interpreted language for so many loc in production was of course concerning (esp. Perl which syntax and semantic are sometime surprising)”
regret · production · rixed · 2019-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use perl to power some web services that have been running a long time. It's a work horse. I'm ok with it but it is hard to read”
mixed · production · acomjean · 2019-12-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“My team has used Perl successfully for 13 years. We use modern Perl and the code is clean.”
endorse · production · 13 yr · tmaly · 2018-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“dislike others (RPG III, COBOL, perl)”
regret · personal · wglb · 2018-11-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Everything was Perl5. There were over 150 different major applications written with it... Touching any of this would cause errors”
regret · production · badjobthrowaway · 2018-11-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Only problem with perl I've run into is analysing text at speed - 60,000 lines a second of regex doesn't work on a raspberry pi”
mixed · personal · isostatic · 2018-10-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“And I'm still scarred from the Autoloader in Perl. Never again!”
regret · production · Annatar · 2018-04-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“My office has at least a few hundred thousand lines of perl 5 (v 5.8.0) running on legacy systems”
mixed · production · extortionist · 2018-01-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“a rather ancient hunk of Perl that works tolerably well but we've mostly avoided touching”
mixed · production · chrismorgan · 2017-10-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I rewrote some of it in Perl, and I've been using that ever since.”
endorse · personal · probably_wrong · 2016-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“This behavior is very practical when writing quick scripts to automate things or process data. And this is the reason I often prefer Perl over Python”
endorse · personal · ceronman · 2015-07-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Plan 9 doesn't have perl at all and in Windows perl has to be installed.”
regret · production · 4ad · 2014-12-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it was actually over 10 times faster than the closest competitor for XML parsing I could fine”
endorse · production · kbenson · 2014-11-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We tested our own code in Perl for doing some text processing in our company. The result was 89 times slower than our c code”
regret · production · Htsthbjig · 2014-11-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We replaced an old perl-cgi web site with it, and I wouldn't touch anything related to perl with a 10 foot pole ever again”
regret · production · penguindev · 2014-01-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Perl's TMTOWTDI is the reason I moved to Python.”
regret · production · disputin · 2013-12-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The largest problem is that it's largely unreadable, a write-only language.”
regret · personal · 3 yr · danhoc01 · 2013-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Been using it since the early 90s. It's ugly, but I know it, it does the job well, and it's reliable.”
mixed · production · 20 yr · runjake · 2013-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Been using Perl for almost 10 years now. ... My main job currently involves maintaining and developing a huge code base in Perl”
endorse · production · 10 yr · arc_of_descent · 2013-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Things I have become an expert in that are now useless to me and probably not valued by an employer”
regret · production · pkteison · 2013-10-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“more 'quick hacks' ends up in production than I'd like, while nobody knows exactly anymore what they do”
regret · production · koffiezet · 2012-12-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I got really fed up with a patch work of "write only" perl scripts performing useful functions in prod.”
regret · production · 3amOpsGuy · 2012-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I like the dynamic type, given that I'm a die-hard Perl programmer”
endorse · personal · DougWebb · 2012-10-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“once your code base reaches several hundred classes, you'll really regret ever considering it for production.”
regret · personal · Protostome · 2012-08-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'm very much on the burnt-by-crazy-old-nasty-perl-legacy-crap side of the fence”
regret · production · e12e · 2012-08-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“For anything more than that, I break out Perl and I never regret it.”
endorse · production · ccashell · 2011-11-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“wrote a Perl script that allowed us to do a text-scanning task in an hour that previously took days”
endorse · production · kragen · 2010-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“For myself, I regret all the time I've spent learning and using it.”
regret · personal · lelele · 2010-09-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the authors of the things I'm depending on in production.”
endorse · production · mst · 2010-07-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I still write a lot of perl, and while interpolation is nice and good to have for simple things”
neutral · production · kbenson · 2026-10-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I was using two other languages other than SQL on a daily basis as well (Perl and Bash)”
neutral · production · tharkun__ · 2024-12-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“with a custom perl hack for a RAG that preserved the outline of the knowledge.”
neutral · personal · alchemist1e9 · 2023-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“20 years of muscle memory writing bash / python / perl / awk / sql / ruby / JS / CSS selectors”
neutral · production · 20 yr · seanp2k2 · 2023-11-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've spent most of my career with perl, python, c#, and java”
neutral · production · saxonww · 2022-12-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we're slowly rewriting a legacy Perl code base to Go HTTP services... in 5 years we migrated maybe 3/4 of the code”
neutral · production · 5 yr · thiht · 2022-03-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We moved to PHP from Perl in the late 90s because of mod_php. We had a vast perl codebase we rewrote to PHP.”
neutral · production · tluyben2 · 2021-04-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've also written Perl and Ruby in production too.”
neutral · production · wolfadex · 2020-12-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've personally used C with CGI-BIN, Perl, ASP.net, PHP”
neutral · personal · alasdair_ · 2020-05-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched out some API code from Perl and Python to Go.”
neutral · production · sethammons · 2020-01-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using my "dots" script for over 10 years to give me feedback that a long task is still running”
neutral · personal · 10 yr · jdblair · 2019-12-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use getopt style command line parameter parsing in at least Java, Perl, Python, and BASH at work”
neutral · production · ohithereyou · 2019-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“R is unlike any other programming language that I have used before (also on an off) from Perl, C to Python and Java”
neutral · personal · glofish · 2019-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we were a big Perl Apache and MySQL shop.”
neutral · production · mmaunder · 2019-10-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“some perl to move data around between vendors and systems”
neutral · production · hermitdev · 2019-09-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the perl hacks and occasional maintenance were a cheap price vs the usability nightmare we have now”
neutral · production · gcb0 · 2018-12-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I took over a Perl project where every SQL call was an exec to a java program which would make the query.”
neutral · production · LanceH · 2018-11-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“having worked through moving a couple of large codebases to surviving strict taint checking in prod”
neutral · production · csirac2 · 2018-07-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched them from a combination of Perl sites and Java sites from Java / ATG Dynamo 10+ servers”
neutral · production · drawkbox · 2018-05-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I was able to get around most of the passive fairly easily with Perl and LWP”
neutral · production · kbenson · 2018-01-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“taught myself perl, php and later rails and javascript.”
neutral · personal · Mc_Big_G · 2017-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I was writing in Perl with its magic variables for more than a half of my professional career”
neutral · production · dozzie · 2017-12-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Our code is scary and terrifying. It's 95% perl5. We run bare metal on nearly everything.”
neutral · production · occultist_throw · 2017-09-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we've moved to Go as our main language for services... we are continuing to move legacy Perl/AnyEvent code over”
neutral · production · sethammons · 2017-07-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I still occasionally get a server monitoring email from a cron job running a Perl program that first mailed me in April '97.”
neutral · production · bigiain · 2017-01-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Our Perl5 CGI.pm codebase used to look like that (html + logic).”
neutral · production · petre · 2016-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have come across quite bad C codebases, poor Perl applications and terrible Java code”
neutral · production · marklgr · 2016-10-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“a Perl script translated from CSV to fixed-column-width format (which happened to be identical to the output format of an old mainframe application”
neutral · production · skissane · 2016-09-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Sometimes half an array in perl is missing its data... Never locally in dev. Only in prod.”
neutral · production · sethammons · 2015-11-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I used to be a HUGE Perl fan, and discounted Python for years.”
neutral · personal · gknoy · 2015-05-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it does some weird things that aren't good practice in "modern" Perl”
neutral · production · robn_fastmail · 2014-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I started with perl scripts and cgi-bin.”
neutral · production · williamcotton · 2014-12-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I worked with C++ and with Perl too, in production.”
neutral · production · bad_user · 2014-10-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“instead of JS we used PERL as the inline script language.”
neutral · production · franze · 2014-06-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Having learned perl, ruby and python (these are all incredibly similar), and then Clojure”
neutral · personal · Myk267 · 2013-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using Perl on and off for more than 10 years, mostly for sysadmin and data munging stuff”
neutral · personal · 10 yr · bierik · 2013-12-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“write my own fetchmail program in a couple hours in Perl. It solved my issues and i've been using it ever since.”
neutral · personal · peterwwillis · 2013-12-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I know Ruby well, (bc I knew Perl very well)”
neutral · production · czbond · 2013-08-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“such as C++/Java/Javascript/Perl/Python. I found that if I use them in my work, I would become good at them”
neutral · production · ww520 · 2012-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I had just come from working on some C++ and CGI/Perl programs so it was pretty different.”
neutral · production · sixdimensional · 2012-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Here's the one that I wrote a while back in Perl that we use at Opera”
neutral · production · alfiejohn_ · 2012-12-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“freeing time to write code in this hot new Perl language rather than trying to compile it.”
neutral · personal · acdha · 2012-10-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“LedgerSMB 1.3 when it shipped last year supported PostgreSQL 8.3 and higher, Perl 5.8, etc...”
neutral · production · einhverfr · 2012-03-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I was already programming in C and Perl at this time.”
neutral · personal · peterwwillis · 2011-12-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Python replaced Perl as the language of choice for anything in a very broad "miscellaneous" category of tools.”
neutral · production · Ogre · 2011-11-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Most data is actually preprocessed using Prolog or Perl.”
neutral · production · microtonal · 2011-11-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“For the same reason we use Java, C++, Scala, Perl, Closure, Bash, JavaScript, etc...”
neutral · production · linuxhansl · 2011-11-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The application above is written in Perl. However we are moving to Moose”
neutral · production · einhverfr · 2011-11-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using Perl professionally for, um, 15 years now”
neutral · production · 15 yr · cwilbur · 2011-10-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I think my last exposure to Perl 4 in production was around 1995.”
neutral · production · jleader · 2011-10-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“This is a choice I made, because it is fun.”
neutral · personal · loewenskind · 2010-11-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use Perl+XS for all of the back-end stuff: our NoSQL data store (multiple petabytes of data), crawling, indexing, and serving queries.”
neutral · production · wumpus · 2010-11-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Python seemed really refreshingly clean compared to Perl and C++, the languages I'd been using previously.”
neutral · personal · silentbicycle · 2010-10-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I regret that I let my early start on RoR waste away while I was building stuff in PHP and Perl/Mason for them.”
neutral · production · 2 yr · jbm · 2010-10-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I stay away from applying for a lot of Perl jobs... though I've been doing it for >5 years.”
neutral · production · 5 yr · symkat · 2010-10-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'm a Perl developer btw and many here consider that on a par with BASIC”
neutral · production · mmaunder · 2010-07-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Most of the systems are built using combinations (pick two) of PHP, JSP, Ruby, Perl, MySQL and Oracle.”
neutral · production · scorchin · 2010-02-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?