The 2017 Perl Developer Survey has come to an end. We conducted the survey over 38 days, from the 7th of March to the 14th of April. We have received 849 responses from developers from all over the world. This was the largest Perl survey in recent years and it showed quite a few interesting trends for the language itself, but even more about the developers that are using it. These are statistics that show the state of Perl in 2017.

Here are the highlights:

Only 3.8 percent of respondents have been using Perl for less than a year

Most respondents also use JavaScript, Python and Bash together with Perl.

Most Perl companies are based in the U.S. and the U.K.

60.3% of respondents are in the 31-48 age bracket.

Vim is the most popular text editor

25.6% of respondents work on desktop apps and 7.3% work on mobile apps.

52.8% of respondents don’t attend Perl conferences

72.1% of respondents don’t blog about their projects/ experiences

Q1 How long have you been using Perl 5?

We used Perl 5 as a version to distinguish it from Perl 6. A vast majority of respondents, 84%, have more than 5 years of experience, while only 3.8% of respondents have less than a year of experience, followed by the 1-3 years bracket with 5.1% and 3-5 years bracket with 7.1%.

This means that the majority of Perl developers have been using it for quite some time now, they’re experienced, senior developers which is a very good thing. But the fact that only 16% of respondents have moved to Perl or learned Perl in the past 5 years is quite worrying.

846 respondents answered this question

Q2 Have you tried Perl 6 or have any interest in trying it out in the future?

We wanted to see how many developers are interested in this new language from the Perl family, to gauge how will Perl 6 transition to a more mainstream position and how much awareness and interest there is for it. 46.1%, the majority, have tried out Perl 6, 39.6% have not tried it, but are willing to have a go at it sometime in the future, and only 13.7% have not tried it out and have no interest in doing so. Only 0.6% of respondents did not know what Perl 6 is.

848 respondents answered this question

Q3 What Perl 5 version do you use?

The most popular Perl version are 5.24 (251 respondents), followed by 5.22 (186 responses) 5.18 (104 respondents), 5.20 (90 respondents) 5.16 (79 respondents), 5.10 (71 respondents), 5.14 (58 respondents). Some use more than one version, depending on what they’re working on. The latest version remains the most popular one.

849 respondents answered this question

Q4 Is Perl 5 your main language?

The majority of respondents, 77% use Perl as a main language, while 23% use it as a secondary language or together with other languages.

849 respondents answered this question

Q5 What other languages do you use?

Most respondents also use other language, together with Perl, only 10.8% are restricted to Perl. From the “I also use” section the most popular responses are (most respondents listed more than one technology):

JavaScript 370 Python 232 Bash 132 C 149 C++ 109 PHP 104 SQL 101 Java 91 Ruby 73 Go 56 C# 32 HTML 31 Perl 6 27 Node.js 26 Scala 22 CSS 19 Swift 14 Fortran 12 Rust 11 Lisp 11 Erlang 8 Assembler 4 Latex 3

846 respondents answered this question

Q6 What is your type of employment?

Most respondents, 73%, work as full time developers, followed by 9.4% that work as freelancers, 8.6% that are contractors, 6.2% in the other section, where we had answers like “in training”, “owner”,”entrepreneur” “unemployed”or “student” and lastly, 2.8% as part time developers.

849 respondents answered this question

Q7 What’s the size of the company you work for?

Perl is being used in all sorts of companies, from the very tiny to the very large. 30.5 % of respondents work for a very large company, with more than 1000 of employees, followed by 25.6% of respondents that work in companies in the 100-1000 bracket. 15% work in small companies, startups, with 1-5 employees. 10.1% work in companies with 5-20 employees while 10.2% work in companies with 50-100 employees. Lastly are developers that work in companies with 20-50 employees.

This shows us in what type of business environment Perl is used. None of the mentioned brackets leads with any type of large majority which means that Perl is used in all sorts of companies.

833 respondents answered this question

Q8 What’s the field of the company you work for?

The responses here were quite diverse, we didn't get a clear majority winner. Here are the top 20 most popular fields:

Software development 55 Web 50 IT 45 Education 39 Services 38 Development 36 Finance/Financial 28 Internet 24 Security 21 Hosting 16 Consulting/Consultancy 16 Research 13 Retail 12 E-commerce 12 Government 12 Marketing 12 Medical 9 Healthcare 8 Banking 7 Engineering 7

813 respondents answered this question

Q9 Where is your company based?

The most popular countries are:

US 277 UK 95 Germany 67 Spain 28 Australia 25 Netherlands 24 France 20 Canada 16 India 16 Russia 13 Norway 11 Austria 10 Czech Republic 10 Italy 10 Israel 8 Brazil 7 Ireland 5 China 5 Portugal 5 Romania 5 South Africa 4 Belgium 4 Mexico 4 Slovakia 4 Switzerland 4

The United States lead the board, the most popular cities for Perl companies are New York, Houston, Boston, Pittsburgh, Chicago and Washington DC. The most popular states are New York, Texas, California, Massachusetts Michigan and Illinois.

In the UK, London is the main location for most Perl companies, for Australia, Melbourne, for Germany, Berlin, for France, Paris, for the Netherlands, Amsterdam and for Spain Barcelona. These are cities with a large percentage of Perl company's headquarters.

Other countries on the list are: Venezuela, Chile, South Korea, Luxembourg, Colombia, Jordan, Lithuania, Belarus, Greece etc.

815 respondents answered this question

Q10 What is your age?

Most respondents are in the 31-48 bracket, 60.3%, followed by those in the 49-69 bracket with 24.4% and the 18-30 bracket with 14.8%. We also have 0.5% of respondents in the 70+ bracket.

849 respondents answered this question

Q11 What’s your nationality?

Without much surprise, given how many Perl companies are based in the U.S. most respondents identity as American, 235, followed by 94 as British (Or English). Keeping the same top three as the location section, German is the third most popular nationality, 54.

The list continues with:

Spanish 27 Australian 25 Indian 23 French 21 Canadian 15 Russian 14 Dutch 15 Italian 11 Norwegian 11 Polish 10 Czech 8 Finnish 8 Danish 7 Portuguese 7 Swedish 7 Romanian 6 Brazilian 5

Also, comparing this with the company location question we noticed that in most cases, their nationality matches the company location, so in the case of on site developers, most work in the same country where they hail from.

818 respondents answered this question

Q12 Do you work remotely or on site?

Most respondents work on site, 66.7% to be more exact, while 21.5%, work remotely. In the other section, with 11.8% we have mostly a combination of the two.

Those who work remotely are mostly experienced developers, almost 90% have more than 5 years of experience.

Remote workers are mostly in the 31-48 age bracket, with 57%, followed by the 49-69 bracket with 31%.

50% of all developers over the age of 70 work remotely (there were only 4 overall).

849 respondents answered this question

Q13 What is your pay niche ?

We had 4 pay brackets here, and the responses are almost equally divided among them. 25.9% earn less than $50k a year, 27.9% are in the $50k-$80k a year bracket, another 27.9% are in the $80k to $120k a year bracket while 18.3% earn more than $120k a year.

Most developers that earn less than $50k work in small and very small companies, 19% in the 1-5 bracket, 14% in the 5-20 bracket and in large and very large companies 22% in the 100-1000 bracket and 23% in the 1000+ bracket.

Most developers that earn more than $120k work in very large companies 37 % in the 1000+ bracket, 25% in the 100-1000 bracket and also in small and very small companies, but in fewer numbers, 15.2% work in the 1-5 bracket and 7% in the 5-20 bracket.

There are more high paid developers in very large companies that low paid developers (even taking into account experience).

The mid level (from a wages point of view) developers which make up a bit more than half of the total ($50k to $120k) work in mostly large companies, 27% (100-1000) and very large 31% (1000+) companies. The rest are almost even across the other brackets.

788 respondents answered this question

Q14 Are you a full stack developer?

We wanted to know how many developers consider themselves full stack. A bit more than half, 56.6% consider themselves full stack developers, while 34.8% do not. In the other section, 8.6% we have responses that mostly debate the concept of full stack and or offered more details about their working environment and if it applies or does not apply.

849 respondents answered this question

Q15 What text editor/IDE do you use?

Vim came out a winner here, with 47.1% while emacs were very popular in the other section, with 138 responses, that translates to 16.25%. Next comes Sublime with 7.7%, followed by Atom with 7.1% and Komodo with 5.9%. From the other section we also have Notepad++ with 5.3%, Eclipse with 4.3% and Visual Studio with 2.1%. Other names mentioned are: Gedit, nano, ultraedit, Bbedit etc.

849 respondents answered this question

We plan to make this survey a yearly event so make sure you follow us on Twitter and/or Facebook.

Check out Part 2 of the Perl Developer Survey Results here!