If you were building web applications during the first dot-com boom, chances are you wrote Perl. And if you’re now a CTO, tech lead, or senior architect, you may instinctively steer teams away from it—even if you can’t quite explain why.
This reflexive aversion isn’t just a preference. It’s what I call Dotcom Survivor Syndrome: a long-standing bias formed by the messy, experimental, high-pressure environment of the early web, where Perl was both a lifeline and a liability.
Perl wasn’t the problem. The conditions under which we used it were. And unfortunately, those conditions, combined with a separate, prolonged misstep over versioning, continue to distort Perl’s reputation to this day.
The Glory Days: Perl at the Heart of the Early Web
In the mid- to late-1990s, Perl was the web’s duct tape.
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It powered CGI scripts on Apache servers.
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It automated deployments before DevOps had a name.
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It parsed logs, scraped data, processed form input, and glued together whatever needed glueing.
Perl 5, released in 1994, introduced real structure: references, modules, and the birth of CPAN, which became one of the most effective software ecosystems in the world.
Perl wasn’t just part of the early web—it was instrumental in creating it.
The Dotcom Boom: Shipping Fast and Breaking Everything
To understand the long shadow Perl casts, you have to understand the speed and pressure of the dot-com boom.
We weren’t just building websites.
We were inventing how to build websites.
Best practices? Mostly unwritten.
Frameworks? Few existed.
Code reviews? Uncommon.
Continuous integration? Still a dream.
The pace was frantic. You built something overnight, demoed it in the morning, and deployed it that afternoon. And Perl let you do that.
But that same flexibility—its greatest strength—became its greatest weakness in that environment. With deadlines looming and scalability an afterthought, we ended up with:
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Thousands of lines of unstructured CGI scripts
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Minimal documentation
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Global variables everywhere
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Inline HTML mixed with business logic
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Security holes you could drive a truck through
When the crash came, these codebases didn’t age gracefully. The people who inherited them, often the same people who now run engineering orgs, remember Perl not as a powerful tool, but as the source of late-night chaos and technical debt.
Dotcom Survivor Syndrome: Bias with a Backstory
Many senior engineers today carry these memories with them. They associate Perl with:
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Fragile legacy systems
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Inconsistent, “write-only” code
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The bad old days of early web development
And that’s understandable. But it also creates a bias—often unconscious—that prevents Perl from getting a fair hearing in modern development discussions.
Version Number Paralysis: The Perl 6 Effect
If Dotcom Boom Survivor Syndrome created the emotional case against Perl, then Perl 6 created the optical one.
In 2000, Perl 6 was announced as a ground-up redesign of the language. It promised modern syntax, new paradigms, and a bright future. But it didn’t ship—not for a very long time.
In the meantime:
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Perl 5 continued to evolve quietly, but with the implied expectation that it would eventually be replaced.
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Years turned into decades, and confusion set in. Was Perl 5 deprecated? Was Perl 6 compatible? What was the future of Perl?
To outsiders—and even many Perl users—it looked like the language was stalled. Perl 5 releases were labelled 5.8, 5.10, 5.12… but never 6. Perl 6 finally emerged in 2015, but as an entirely different language, not a successor.
Eventually, the community admitted what everyone already knew: Perl 6 wasn’t Perl. In 2019, it was renamed Raku.
But the damage was done. For nearly two decades, the version number “6” hung over Perl 5 like a storm cloud – a constant reminder that its future was uncertain, even when that wasn’t true.
This is what I call Version Number Paralysis:
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A stalled major version that made the language look obsolete.
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A missed opportunity to signal continued relevance and evolution.
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A marketing failure that deepened the sense that Perl was a thing of the past.
Even today, many developers believe Perl is “stuck at version 5,” unaware that modern Perl is actively maintained, well-supported, and quite capable.
While Dotcom Survivor Syndrome left many people with an aversion to Perl, Version Number Paralysis gave them an excuse not to look closely at Perl to see if it had changed.
What They Missed While Looking Away
While the world was confused or looking elsewhere, Perl 5 gained:
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Modern object systems (Moo, Moose)
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A mature testing culture (Test::More, Test2)
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Widespread use of best practices (Perl::Critic, perltidy, etc.)
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Core team stability and annual releases
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Huge CPAN growth and refinements
But those who weren’t paying attention, especially those still carrying dotcom-era baggage, never saw it. They still think Perl looks like it did in 2002.
Can We Move On?
Dotcom Survivor Syndrome is real. So is Version Number Paralysis. Together, they’ve unfairly buried a language that remains fast, expressive, and battle-tested.
We can’t change the past. But we can:
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Acknowledge the emotional and historical baggage
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Celebrate the role Perl played in inventing the modern web
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Educate developers about what Perl really is today
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Push back against the assumption that old == obsolete
Conclusion
Perl’s early success was its own undoing. It became the default tool for the first web boom, and in doing so, it took the brunt of that era’s chaos. Then, just as it began to mature, its versioning story confused the industry into thinking it had stalled.
But the truth is that modern Perl is thriving quietly in the margins – maintained by a loyal community, used in production, and capable of great things.
The only thing holding it back is a generation of developers still haunted by memories of CGI scripts, and a version number that suggested a future that never came.
Maybe it’s time we looked again.
