Perl, a once-popular programming language that dates again to 1987, has seen a resurgence within the Tiobe index of language reputation. The language ranked tenth on this month’s Tiobe index, having risen from twenty seventh one yr in the past. Perl ranked as excessive as third in its heyday.
In a bulletin accompanying the September 2025 version of the index, revealed September 8, Tiobe CEO Paul Jansen mentioned that the “technical” motive for Perl’s excessive rating right now is the large variety of books about Perl on Amazon. “It has 4 instances extra books listed than as an example PHP, or seven instances extra books than Rust,” Jansen mentioned. He speculated that the underlying “actual” motive for Perl’s resurgence could also be that Perl 5, which was rolled out in 1994, is now progressively being thought-about the actual Perl. The implementation of Perl 6, which arrived December 25, 2015, took many years to develop and was finally rebranded as Raku, he added. “Throughout these many years, the previous improvement of Perl 5 stalled kind of, and because of this the Perl neighborhood was left with uncertainty,” Jansen mentioned. “On the similar time, a pleasant various, Python, matured, and lots of Perl programmers moved to Python.”
Scores for the month-to-month Tiobe Programming Group index are primarily based on the variety of engineers worldwide, programs, and third-party distributors pertaining to every language. These are decided utilizing web sites comparable to Google, Bing, Wikipedia, and Amazon.