Linked by Adam S on Wed 13th Jul 2005 12:53 UTC
The Question: With the emergence of .NET, J2EE, Python, PHP, et. al, has Perl lost its niche as a scripting glue language? The Answer: Tim O'Reilly gives his two cents. 
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Member since:Perl's OOP is very good, and it is massively used, if you didn't know.
Look at CPAN, most modules there provide OO interfaces.
Modules like DBI, CGI all provide perfect object oriented interface, as well as Net::LDAP, LWP, and basically everything I've touched so far.
Perl's OO is, as everything in this language, is easy, simply-looking, unnecesary to use if you don't need it, and amazely flexible and powerful, I guess it have features of which both Python and PHP don't even think. Python is minimalistic, and PHPP is a reduced Perl, given that.
Member since:
2005-07-06
Perl is quite difficult to learn, due to an over-abundance of features and an odd jumble of syntaxes taken from the languages that inspired it. PHP comes with a far greater standard library, and organises its features in more standard ways, than Perl does currently.
Further, both PHP, Python and Ruby provide clean frameworks for object orientated programming (though PHP only really caught up in version five). Given that all new programmers these days are though OOP, this is a major advantage. Perl currently supports - just about - a form of OOP; however it is so complicated that a lot of developers simply ignore it.
Basically, all the languages released since or after Perl 5 are better than Perl 5. However we will have to see what Perl 6 offers before it can be counted out. The author's have talked about making significant changes.
Realistically though, Perl has lost a lot of developers since Perl 5 was released, and if they don't offer some major incentives in version 6, they could find themselves being the next TCL.