Why move away from Perl? From the readers of the Perl Weekly

Recently I asked the readers of the Perl Weekly Newsletter about the motivations they see for companies that want to move away from Perl.

I got a lot of private responses. I am publishing here a collection of the thoughts that were shared with me.

1. It is very difficult to find seasoned Perl developers and it is almost impossible to find junior developers.
2. The shrinking size of the community leads to lack of maintenance of critical libraries and lack of support from core teams.
3. Lack of official APIs and SDKs developed and distributed by vendors.
4. The growing amount of time and money the company needs to invest in the development and maintenance of libraries that are available in some other languages but not on CPAN.
5. It is harder to convince people to learn Perl because of the lack of coolness of the language and the lack of jobs in Perl meaning it is a less marketable knowledge than some other languages.

Why do companies stay with Perl?

• The only reason we keep using Perl is, that migrating the code base would be a major effort and business want to spend their money on business improvements.
• The reason is that for webdev Perl is just fine, does everything we want, we like working with Perl and see no reason to change.
• We have very few technologies that have lasted 25 or more years and a significant part of that is the reliability and capability of the underlying technology: Perl.