The Popularity of Perl in 2014

A year ago I've published an article called The Popularity of Perl in 2013

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

This is an updated version of that report.

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. It grew from 4156 on 1 January 2013 to 5103 on 31 December 2013 and to 5645. on 31 December 2014. It's Google+ page was circled by 4,066 people on 1 January 2014 and 4,874 on 1 January 2015. (I don't seem to have the number from the beginning og 2013.)

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 1 Jan 2015.

Perl

site 15 Jan 2013 1 Jan 2014 1 Jan 2015
cpan.org 10,222 8,807 14,428
perl.org 18,634 14,772 21,893
perlmonks.org 21,521 21,273 26,500
metacpan.org 143,975 73,877 69,477
perlmaven.com 679,764 199,901 99,531
munin-monitoring.org 106,196 89,993 129,329
bugzilla.org 94,309 91,851 148,722
movabletype.org 158,640 125,646 160,519
perl.com 189,149 200,674 271,028
perlmeme.org - 204,513 275,253
otrs.org 187,82 130,611 327,586
mojolicio.us 614,109 515,543 335,675
cpantesters.org 553,281 265,792 344,731
dadamailproject.com 153,316 135,448 357,760
perlgeek.de 1,244,368 476,736 398,956
site 15 Jan 2013 1 Jan 2014 1 Jan 2015
strawberryperl.com 421,282 354,047 406,097
foswiki.org 440,926 379,461 421,097
perltricks.com - 910,000 421,194
www.perlfect.com - 351,860 427,574
template-toolkit.org 535,891 407,008 483,630
webgui.org 420,044 669,840 542,179
catalystframework.org 679,637 447,718 563,539
perl-community.de 465,767 259,690 623,151
perldancer.org 612,468 566,055 723,862
perlide.org 941,509 799,919 763,733
pm.org 382,919 447,865 765,765
perlfoundation.org 403,687 820,284 895,179
www.misc-perl-info.com - 597,487 963,995
perl6.org 956,529 1,597,330 970,857
modernperlbooks.com 646,809 552,230 1,173,818
perl-begin.org 851,904 3,236,437 1,194,368
perlhacks.com 4,922,207 1,440,058 1,640,884
dwimperl.com - - 1,759,392
perlbuzz.com 1,155,833 752,738 2,714,571
perl-tutorial.org 1,260,631 1,814,361 4,126,720
perlnews.org 2,604,882 954,340 4,221,820
perl6maven.com - - 7,301,179

Google Analytics

Google Analytics provide a much more accurate measurements of number of visitors and page-views. I have access to the data of several major, and a few smaller Perl-related sites.

Number of pageviews

SiteDecember 2013December 2014Annual change
CPAN total 2,183,6101,940,160-11.2%
search.cpan.org 1,758,9771,363,260-22.5%
metacpan.org 424,633 576,90035.8%
perlmaven.com 116,574 250,970115.0%
blogs.perl.org 59,524 72,46522.0%
strawberryperl.com 40,606 40,5470.0%
padre.perlide.org 27,585 27,7050.0%
dwimperl.com 10,942 10,221-6.6%
perldancer.org 9,916 9,1720.0%
advent.perldancer.org 6,667 9,93850.0%
perl6maven.com 1,561 3,983155.0%

Number of sessions

SiteDecember 2013December 2014Annual change
CPAN total 837,856771,615-7.9%
search.cpan.org 700,382597,417-14.8%
metacpan.org 137,474174,19827.0%
perlmaven.com 84,810184,000116.0%
blogs.perl.org 44,195 52,01218.2%
strawberryperl.com 31,690 31,3290.0%
padre.perlide.org 10,333 11,3609.7%
dwimperl.com 7,813 7,368-6.5%
perldancer.org 5,214 5,3880.0%
advent.perldancer.org 3,568 4,42125.7%
perl6maven.com 846 1,44570.0%

Number of users

SiteDecember 2013December 2014Annual change
CPAN total 485,503449,333-7.5%
search.cpan.org 403,164357,156-11.5%
metacpan.org 82,339 92,17712.2%
perlmaven.com 59,728117,08298.3%
blogs.perl.org 31,859 36,49414.1%
strawberryperl.com 27,337 26,408-3.3%
padre.perlide.org 8,531 9,55911.7%
dwimperl.com 6,638 6,7841.5%
perldancer.org 4,027 4,0740.0%
advent.perldancer.org 2,138 2,1800.0%
perl6maven.com 680 1,16972.0%

CPAN total is metacpan.org+search.cpan.org

Data from perl.org and perl.com

I don't have access to the Google Analytics of the other perl.org sites, but I got some data from Ask Bjørn Hansen, one of the owners and admins of perl.org. (Beginning of February 2014).

The rest of the sites have less than 50k visitors a month.

At a glance then except for learn.perl.org traffic has been pretty much flat for 4-5 years.

learn.perl.org has been growing from ~12k/month to 40k visits a month over the last 4 years, though likely that's related to the redesign a few years ago.

See also relative popularity of programming languages in 2014.