The Popularity of Perl in 2018 February
More than 2 year ago I've published an article called The Popularity of Perl in 2015
It contained a list of sites with their Alexa ranking and a few sites with information from their Google Analytics.
This is an updated version of that report for February 2018.
The Popularity of Perl
There are many ways to measure the popularity of a programming language. We are going to look at 3 measurements here:
Perl Weekly
The Perl Weekly website itself does not get a lot of visitors. What is interesting there is the number of subscribers.
2013.01.01 4,156 2013.12.31 5,103 2014.12.31 5,645 2015.12.31 5,927 2018.02.16 6,408
These numbers are, of course, more indicative to the popularity of the Perl Weekly, than that of Perl.
Alexa
The Alexa rankings provide a proximate ranking of web sites. It has big and strange fluctuations, but lacking more exact data, it can be a good indicator for the relative popularity of web sites.
Ordered according to their position on 16 February 2018.
Perl
| site | 15 Jan 2013 | 1 Jan 2014 | 1 Jan 2015 | 1 Jan 2016 | 16 Feb 2018 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| cpan.org | 10,222 | 8,807 | 14,428 | 23,132 | 48,073 |
| perl.org | 18,634 | 14,772 | 21,893 | 28,302 | 48,609 |
| perlmonks.org | 21,521 | 21,273 | 26,500 | 25,771 | 50,906 |
| perlmaven.com | 679,764 | 199,901 | 99,531 | 87,591 | 113,094 |
| metacpan.org | 143,975 | 73,877 | 69,477 | 95,279 | 147,167 |
| bugzilla.org | 94,309 | 91,851 | 148,722 | 182,114 | 215,968 |
| strawberryperl.com | 421,282 | 354,047 | 406,097 | 526,210 | 318,234 |
| movabletype.org | 393,944 | ||||
| perl.com | 189,149 | 200,674 | 271,028 | 301,739 | 488,704 |
| munin-monitoring.org | 106,196 | 89,993 | 129,329 | 166,561 | 511,255 |
| perlmeme.org | - | 204,513 | 275,253 | 346,090 | 512,252 |
| otrs.org | 187,82 | 130,611 | 327,586 | 277,734 | 517,920 |
| twiki.org | 158,640 | 125,646 | 160,519 | 172,169 | 572,399 |
| site | 15 Jan 2013 | 1 Jan 2014 | 1 Jan 2015 | 1 Jan 2016 | 16 Feb 2018 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| perlide.org | 941,509 | 799,919 | 763,733 | 733,524 | 847,411 |
| perlgeek.de | 1,244,368 | 476,736 | 398,956 | 584,578 | 943,116 |
| mojolicio.us | 614,109 | 515,543 | 335,675 | 551,125 | 963,204 |
| perl-community.de | 465,767 | 259,690 | 623,151 | 674,163 | 1,010,899 |
| perl6.org | 956,529 | 1,597,330 | 970,857 | 231,040 | 1,200,932 |
| modernperlbooks.com | 646,809 | 552,230 | 1,173,818 | 948,062 | 1,271,620 |
| dadamailproject.com | 153,316 | 135,448 | 357,760 | 322,546 | 1,371,006 |
| cpantesters.org | 553,281 | 265,792 | 344,731 | 1,243,869 | 1,375,112 |
| foswiki.org | 440,926 | 379,461 | 421,097 | 528,648 | 1,496,603 |
| webgui.org | 420,044 | 669,840 | 542,179 | 507,279 | 1,540,905 |
| pm.org | 382,919 | 447,865 | 765,765 | 681,008 | 1,557,952 |
| perl-begin.org | 851,904 | 3,236,437 | 1,194,368 | 1,059,210 | 1,599,629 |
| template-toolkit.org | 535,891 | 407,008 | 483,630 | 622,442 | 1,798,042 |
| 1,341,985 | 4,497,852 | - | 1,232,354 | 1,968,159 | |
| perlfoundation.org | 403,687 | 820,284 | 895,179 | 868,221 | 1,986,401 |
| perlhacks.com | 4,922,207 | 1,440,058 | 1,640,884 | 2,110,479 | 2,113,237 |
| perldancer.org | 612,468 | 566,055 | 723,862 | 1,207,023 | 2,190,633 |
| www.perlfect.com | - | 351,860 | 427,574 | 992,570 | 2,434,728 |
| perl-tutorial.org | 1,260,631 | 1,814,361 | 4,126,720 | 4,417,830 | 3,115,745 |
| catalystframework.org | 679,637 | 447,718 | 563,539 | 1,399,517 | 4,493,587 |
| perlnews.org | 2,604,882 | 954,340 | 4,221,820 | 4,254,371 | 9,629,551 |
| perl6maven.com | - | - | 7,301,179 | 4,153,084 | 12,380,990 |
| perlbuzz.com | 1,155,833 | 752,738 | 2,714,571 | 5,803,133 | 12,968,528 |
| www.misc-perl-info.com | - | 597,487 | 963,995 | 5,199,525 | 19,173,202 |
| perltricks.com | - | 910,000 | 421,194 | 539,408 | (merged with perl.com) |
| dwimperl.com | - | - | 1,759,392 | 2,001,871 | (moved to subdomain) |
Google Analytics
Google Analytics provide a much more accurate measurements of number of visitors and page-views. See the number of visits to CPAN sites.