As per the article at W3Techs, Perl ranks the lowest among the server side scripting languages, even less than Java? Is there any reason behind it? Perl, as far as I see, is very popular, and an awesome language, how come it is hardly used by websites? Does it have issues with server side scripting?
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This article has a lot of details on how W3Techs gets their data: http://w3techs.com/blog/entry/usage_of_perl_for_websites_fell_below_1_percent
As i did some analysis on this, let me summarize in short that the data presented by W3Techs is deeply flawed and extremely misleading. First off, it is important to know that they detect technologies of sites by running simple scripts at them that look for file suffixes in urls and then just take that and never verify with the site owner. As such they have a “no-detect” rate of 17.6% (plus an unknown “false-detect” rate). A more correct version of their chart would be this:
If you’d like to get more details and more mistakes in their data methodology, please take a look at the comments of the article, especially those written by “Mithaldu” or “Christian Walde”, i.e. me. I posted extensively there as to why their data is nearly useless and why they’re even misinterpreting the data they do have.