Recently an article was published that claimed Perl usage in websites had dropped below 1%. For a Perl developer this seems ridiculous on the face of it. As it turned out, it was ridiculous, since the error margin was 17.6%. Meaning that for 17.6% of the sites they surveyed they could not even detect that they were using Perl. And they only survey the top 1 million, out of the 175 million active sites Netcraft reported. So the validity of these numbers is highly suspect.
So, all is fine? Catastrophe averted? Heh, not really.
Here's the issue: To a Perl developer this might seem ridiculous. Most of us are aware of how many websites use it under the hood. But to the average person it seems perfectly reasonable. The suffixes ".php" and ".asp" are ubiquitous and lets everyone know what the website is running on. Ruby and Python operations are proud of using their languages and flaunt it. To an average person it might even seem like there are more Ruby and Python websites.
Yet Perl is practically invisible. It drives a lot of sites, businesses and livelihoods worldwide, neither of which make any indication of the tools they're using. Let's take a look at a random sampling:
| Site | Alexa Rank |
|---|---|
| imdb.com | 37 |
| booking.com | 245 |
| cpanel.net | 1,710 |
| net-a-porter.com | 2,195 |
| lovefilm.com | 3,149 |
| liquidweb.com | 7,776 |
| slando.com | 25,266 |
| socialtext.net | 145,896 |
| bestpractical.com | 161,366 |
| metacpan.org | 172,291 |
| hiveminder.com | 295,127 |
These are sites that run on Perl, but to look at them you'd never even know it. Perl has advanced route dispatching mechanisms and its great modularity makes it possible to write an entire website as a single application. In fact, for most modern Perl web frameworks it has become customary to run web applications as self-hosting services to which a web server connects via a network port. Perl has made it very easy to design one's url structure exclusively around the data one serves, which has made it entirely impossible to tell for most Perl-driven sites that they actually are Perl.
Now, all of these sites have reasons to be proud of the tools they use. Some of them indeed are very proud, booking.com for example has donated 150.000 USD last year to Perl development and others on the list have donated smaller amounts as well or are supporting Perl conferences and spend a lot of money to have a presence on Perl conferences. Those on the list who are hiring, are also hiring Perl developers, some of them quite prominently. Even others on the list are websites created for the express purpose of serving the Perl community.
Yet none of them even mention Perl on their frontpage or even link to perl.org. I know Perl doesn't have nice and easy promotion buttons like Python or PHP do. But a simple text link does the job just as well. Just a simple "Built with Perl" in the footer or a sidebar would show that you care about Perl, would make it easier for job seekers to notice that you're looking for Perl devs and would raise the visibility of Perl and make it a more appealing choice for students looking to learn a dynamic language.
I do not believe this is done out of any maliciousness and that it's rather just a simple oversight, something that was never considered. As such i've sent a small email to each of those sites, asking them to consider this issue and to please add a link to perl.org or to weigh in on why they would not do it. Maybe they are issues that the Perl community can fix.
Similarly, if you own a site yourself that runs on Perl and does not link to perl.org:
Why does your site not link to perl.org?!