Perl

perl.org leads with duration: “a highly capable, feature-rich programming language with over 37 years of development”. Not a design commitment, not a benchmark — an age. Version 5.44.0 (read from perl.org on 2026-08-06; not cross-checked against a second source). CPAN carries over 25,000 extension modules, and the community section counts more than 230 local groups, mailing lists and discussion sites, plus free learning material and conferences. The Perl Foundation advances the language “through open discussion, collaboration, design, and code”. Raku is named as “a sister language, part of the Perl family, not intended as a replacement for Perl, but as its own thing”.

T1 — first-party. No usage statistics and no performance claims. Text processing and regular expressions, the things Perl is known for, are not the page’s argument either.

Longevity as the pitch

Every other front page in this corpus sells a decision — ownership, goroutines, purity, types, minimalism. Perl’s sells continuity: it is still here, the module archive is still deep, the local groups still meet. That is what a language’s marketing becomes when the design argument was won and then lost, and it belongs next to lisp, the corpus’s other language with a documented decline and a long tail. The difference is that Wikipedia said the quiet part about Lisp; here the omission is the message.

awk‘s page named Perl (1987) as the language that absorbed its text-processing model and generalized it. So the corpus now holds the successor’s own page, and the successor does not mention the thing it succeeded at. What replaced Perl in that niche is partly python and partly jq-shaped tools for data that stopped being lines of text.

Raku, and a split with no precedent here

Every other language that changed radically kept its name and shed compatibility — lua breaks between versions, php patches four branches at once. Perl did the opposite: the redesign became a separate language with a different name, explicitly not a replacement, while Perl 5 continues under active development. For language-governance that is a fourth thing a steward can do with a breaking redesign, next to shipping it, forking it (Luau from lua) and refusing it. It is also the only case in the corpus where a language chose not to inherit its own successor’s adoption.

Related

awk · python · lisp · lua · php · jq · language-governance · programming-language · synthesis