Why Perl Still Matters: Exploring the New 5.38.1 Release and Its Legacy

Perl, the venerable programming language, has announced a new version.

On November 27, the Perl 5 series released its latest version, 5.38.1.

Perl 5.38.1 is the newest release of the Perl 5 series originally launched in 1994. Developers should note that Perl 6 has been renamed "Raku" and is part of the Perl family.

What is Perl

Perl boasts a large and active developer and user community, with many libraries and modules for a wide range of purposes. Over the years the language has undergone several major revisions, the latest being Perl 5.38.

One of Perl's most distinctive features is its "TIMTOWTDI" philosophy – "There Is More Than One Way To Do It" – meaning that developers often have multiple ways to accomplish a task and can choose the approach that best fits their needs.

Perl is also renowned for its powerful regular‑expression support, allowing flexible text manipulation. The language provides a rich set of built‑in functions for string handling, and many additional capabilities are available through third‑party libraries and modules.

Perl is used in a broad spectrum of applications, from simple scripts to complex web applications and large software systems. It is widely employed in bioinformatics for genome data analysis, as well as in system administration for task automation and server management.

In recent years Perl has faced competition from languages such as Python and Ruby, but its flexibility, expressive power, and extensive ecosystem of libraries keep it a popular choice for many developers. The community continues to maintain and evolve the language, with Perl 7 currently under development.

Perl History

We summarize the development of the Perl language by decade:

Perl 1.0 (1987)

Perl 2.0 (1988)

Perl 3.0 (1989)

Perl 4.0 (1991)

Perl 5.0 (1994)

Perl 5.6 (2000)

Perl 5.8 (2002)

Perl 5.10 (2007)

Perl 5.12 (2010)

Perl 5.14 (2011)

Perl 5.16 (2012)

Perl 5.18 (2013)

Perl 5.20 (2014)

Perl 5.22 (2015)

Perl 5.24 (2016)

Perl 5.26 (2017)

Perl 5.28 (2018)

Perl 5.30 (2019)

Perl 5.32 (2020)

Perl 5.34 (2021)

Perl 5.38 (2023)

Many of the changes in Perl 5 stem from CPAN, which now hosts over 25,000 extensions. This release primarily includes security and bug fixes, and developers are encouraged to upgrade.

Perl has been around for nearly 30 years, evolving from version 5.0 in 1994 to the current 5.38, demonstrating a robustness that developers can learn from.