Our Director of Engineering at ActiveState, Tom Radcliffe, recently presented a talk at YAPC North America titled “The Perl Paradox.” This concept refers to the fact that Perl has become virtually invisible in recent years while remaining one of the most important and critical modern programming languages. Little, if any, media attention has been paid to it, despite being ubiquitous in the backrooms of the enterprise.

Yet at ActiveState, we have seen our Perl business continue to grow and thrive. Increasingly, our customers tell us that not only are they using more Perl but they’re doing more sophisticated things with it. Perl itself recently made it back into the Top 10 of the Tiobe rankings, and it remains one of the highest paying technologies. Therein lies the paradox.

Check out Tom’s complete talk below as he discusses this paradox and what he sees as the burgeoning of “The Perl Renaissance":

For more Perl content, you can also view a Perl webinar that Tom recently did with Jason McIntosh (co-author of “Perl & XML”) titled “A Long-Time Perl Hacker's View of the Perl World: Past, Present and Future.”