What are the popular, contemporary uses for Perl?

Question

What are the popular, contemporary uses for Perl?

Edit

I should have been more specific. I was wondering more on the large scale (popular) what people are using Perl for rather than what it could be used for on the individual level.

Spitzer

this should probably be community wiki – Shameful

Answer 1

As a glue language, system administrators' language, and now, it is back to taking-over-the-internet using Catalyst.

Transpacific

woot, catalyst, that looks great! – Firelock

That's because it is great! ;) – Gummite

Answer 2

At my University Perl is widely used for Bioinformatic tasks. Automatic changing the format of a Proteindata file, checking with a database transforming the results back and so on. So its mostly changing file formats, regular expressions, and parsing of huge datasets

Sopher

Answer 3

The same as ever: Making the impossible, possible. ;-)

Biller

Answer 4

The problem with this question, is that Perl is a very versatile language. Between code golf and it's similarity to awk/sed, it is still widely used as a glue language and quick go-to language for sysadmin tasks.

With CPAN, lots of very useful and more advanced things can be written quickly.

It interfaces well with databases and there are tons of frameworks for web design. It works quite well with Ajax, as I've noticed through my own use of it.

Get into best practices, and you've got a system that is quite good at doing very large programming tasks. Heck, the whole of cpan is a testament to Perl's reusability and encapsulation.

See skills that are being sought by employers at http://jobs.perl.org/.

Firelock

Answer 5

Along with Python, the system administrators in my company love it for driving automation tasks. "If something is worth doing, it's worth automating" seems to be a mantra, and if they can do it in five lines, all the better.

Mensal

Answer 6

Somewhat confused by the question. For coding.

I think it would be better framed as: What isn't Perl used for? Which I'd answer with: Writing device drivers, anyone got any more?

It's used for gui apps (See Padre), Internet apps (Catalyst), other networking/sockets (POE), accessing databases (DBI), Cryptology (Crypt namespace), Web services (SOAP), Handling binary formats (pack/unpack)...

And of course all manner of text processing.

And that's just the stuff I've used it for.. recently.

Tildi

Answer 7

Amazon and IMDB uses Perl, more specifically Mason, IIANM.

Hemorrhoid

Answer 8

I currently am using Perl to write an automated testing suite for my company's web sites (using WWW::Mechanize and WWW::Selenium). One of my co-workers is doing the same for other types of servers. We also use it for our monitoring software (Nagios). And I use perl daily as a commandline tool to aid in basic sysadminy tasks.

Zaratite

Answer 9

Web sites, data processing/extraction, system administration, task automation, even GUI programming. Mathematics, bioinformatics, chemistry, geology programs.

Ravelment

Answer 10

You can find out quite a bit about what people are currently doing with Perl by taking a look at the posts submitted to the Enlightened Perl Iron Man Challenge.

Personally, I'm currently using it to build the site for (yet another) AJAX-enabled, Twitterfied, etc., etc. social networking startup.

Embed

Answer 11

Try running this with the terminal size set to at least 120x50 and you will be enlightened ;).

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                           ;h(8.0         ,0.98,0,     1);         redo}###
                         #written                                 060204 by
                       #liverpole                                  @@@@@@@
                    #@@@@@@@@@@@

Prefix

This is an all-time use scenario for Perl -- geek art :-) – Bellwort

Answer 12

I wrote a short, simple script to parse some data out of a log file recently. I find it pretty easy and useful for quick scripting tasks.

Shameful

Answer 13

At my company we used to use Perl to run hundreds of RegEx's to transform random publisher files into SGML to make electronic books. Alas, those days are over now that we've updated our systems to XML books.

Petrozavodsk

Answer 14

I use Perl for what it has been designed: a Practical way for Extracting useful information from raw data and presenting them in human-readable Reports. This is a very nice Language for this task.

Carmelcarmela