I've been maintaining a large perl codebase that I and some friends wrote for 20 years now. It sure has some cruft, but I am often blown away by how massively productive I am in it. And in 20 years, Perl has never broken compatibility for us that I know of. (Though a few spooky CPAN that relied on unsafe internals did require fixing.)
One interesting thing I've noticed about perl is that almost all the examples of how to do something online are absolutely terrible. Our codebase is good because we learned how to write perl clearly, and it looks nothing like how we started out from examples.
Anyways, I don't really have a point, except to say Perl really is amazing, even if it's not really growing nowadays. I think it will be around for ages to come.
One interesting thing I've noticed about perl is that almost all the examples of how to do something online are absolutely terrible. Our codebase is good because we learned how to write perl clearly, and it looks nothing like how we started out from examples.
Anyways, I don't really have a point, except to say Perl really is amazing, even if it's not really growing nowadays. I think it will be around for ages to come.