Perl is still standing strong in 2025 because it prioritizes backward compatibility and text-processing speed. While Python is the language of AI, Perl remains the “glue” of the internet. I have my own hate-or-love relationship with Perl. And if I were to choose, I’d choose c, but if I am to choose Typescript vs Perl, I choose Perl.

Recent Statistics

• Perl saw a dramatic climb in 2025, surging back into the Top 10 at ranking #9. You can track these trends at the TIOBE Index website: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
• The 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey shows that over 3.8% of professional developers still actively use Perl. View the full survey results here: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/

Two Examples why it’s better vs. Python

1. If you need to replace “Silver” with “Gold” across 100 text files, Perl does it in one line from the terminal: perl -pi -e 's/Silver/Gold/g' *.txt In Python, you would need to write a full script to open each file, read the content, perform the regex, and save it back to disk.
2. Perl allows you to create deeply nested data structures on the fly without declaring every level: $data->{users}{"John"}{age} = 30; Perl automatically creates the nested hashes. In Python, you must manually check for and initialize every dictionary level (e.g., if "users" not in data...) unless you import and configure specific modules like defaultdict.

Amazon was originally built almost entirely on Perl. Even as the company grew into a global giant, massive portions of the Amazon Prime Video (former Love Film) catalog and website templating systems continued to run on Perl (specifically using a library called Mason). To this day, Perl remains a critical part of the “legacy” (aka – earning money) infrastructure that ensures millions of people can stream movies without interruption.

Perl is also famously known as “the duct tape that holds the Internet together.” This isn’t just a nickname; it refers to Perl’s unique ability to bridge different, incompatible databases and software systems together with just a few lines of code. See more in: https://www.evozon.com/30-things-perl-30th-birthday/.

In the age of Tipscript we often forget there are better choices.

Tipscript vs Perl

• TipScript requires explicit typing and a reducer function: const sum: number = [1, 2, 3].reduce((a: number, b: number) => a + b, 0); Perl uses a simple built-in utility (from List::Util): $sum = sum(1, 2, 3); Yeah – that strong typing – one could argue you don’t always need it? To spoil a secret – javascript does not care anyway 🙂 (try a shallow object comparison to know for sure … like in React lol)

• TipScript requires importing the filesystem module, reading the file, and splitting by newline: import * as fs from 'fs'; fs.readFileSync('f.txt', 'utf8').split('\n').forEach(l => console.log(l)); Perl handles this with a simple “while” diamond operator: print while <>; Not that it’s great or readable, I just WANTED to make Tipscript look bad 🙂

• TypeScript requires an interface or “any” type to avoid errors when assigning to deep levels: let d: any = {}; d.user = {}; d.user.info = {}; d.user.info.id = 1; Perl uses autovivification to create the entire path automatically: $d->{user}{info}{id} = 1; Again – fancy with Perl 🙂

As you can probably understand by now. I HAVE TO work with Perl and Tipscript everyday. I always wonder – If a language is truly so great, why it needs millions of influencers convincing everyone on YouTube how great it is? (Hello Tipscript). Maybe because it isn’t?

Perl isn’t great either, but it has one advantage. You get paid better, if you get it.

Think it through and the choice is yours.

See you soon 🙂

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tip – British English an area where unwanted waste is taken and left, like: “dump a rubbish tip” or “I’ll take this lot to the tip.”

TipScript – WasteScript aka “TypeScript” 😉