More than 2 year ago I've published an article called The Popularity of Perl in 2015

It contained a list of sites with their Alexa ranking and a few sites with information from their Google Analytics.

This is an updated version of that report for February 2018.

The Popularity of Perl

There are many ways to measure the popularity of a programming language. We are going to look at 3 measurements here:

Perl Weekly

The Perl Weekly website itself does not get a lot of visitors. What is interesting there is the number of subscribers.

2013.01.01 4,156 2013.12.31 5,103 2014.12.31 5,645 2015.12.31 5,927 2018.02.16 6,408

These numbers are, of course, more indicative to the popularity of the Perl Weekly, than that of Perl.

Alexa

The Alexa rankings provide a proximate ranking of web sites. It has big and strange fluctuations, but lacking more exact data, it can be a good indicator for the relative popularity of web sites.

Ordered according to their position on 16 February 2018.

Perl

site 15 Jan 2013 1 Jan 2014 1 Jan 2015 1 Jan 2016 16 Feb 2018 cpan.org 10,222 8,807 14,428 23,132 48,073 perl.org 18,634 14,772 21,893 28,302 48,609 perlmonks.org 21,521 21,273 26,500 25,771 50,906 perlmaven.com 679,764 199,901 99,531 87,591 113,094 metacpan.org 143,975 73,877 69,477 95,279 147,167 bugzilla.org 94,309 91,851 148,722 182,114 215,968 strawberryperl.com 421,282 354,047 406,097 526,210 318,234 movabletype.org 393,944 perl.com 189,149 200,674 271,028 301,739 488,704 munin-monitoring.org 106,196 89,993 129,329 166,561 511,255 perlmeme.org - 204,513 275,253 346,090 512,252 otrs.org 187,82 130,611 327,586 277,734 517,920 twiki.org 158,640 125,646 160,519 172,169 572,399

Google Analytics

Google Analytics provide a much more accurate measurements of number of visitors and page-views. See the number of visits to CPAN sites.