++for posting the benchmark/comparison.

The only question that remains for me is why oh why do so many in the Perl5 community insist on wanting to write Java in Perl?

Because they can. Remember, in Perl There Is Always More Than One Way To Do It.

That is really the beauty of the language. You can choose whatever coding style you prefer and Perl will just do the right thing (patent pending :-)

A proper programming language should always try to help solve to problem, not trying to enforce the original designers misguided attempts at defining a coding style that fits everybody.

Don't use '#ff0000':
use Acme::AutoColor; my $redcolor = RED();
All colors subject to change without notice.

After wading through the whole thread and reading quite a lot of interesting comments, I'm surprised at how little emphasis CPAN has gotten in the comments. It's mentioned several times, but usually almost in passing. It's the thing that really makes Perl amazingly useful for me. Even if the language doesn't evolve, CPAN is packed with useful modules that are very stable and/or well maintained.

Most of what I do with Perl is "quick hacks" that are a page or two of code at most, but I think most of what makes them quick hacks is that there is a module in CPAN that does 90% or more of what I need done (usually the heavy lifting part, with decent exception handling) and all I need to do is wrap my specific problem around it. Need to pull a particular fraction out of the whole Wikipedia dump? Working code in about 5 minutes, big file of useful stuff in an hour. Need to mess with some XML? Pick your library- simple ones for simple problems, and comprehensive ones for the tougher ones. Need QR codes? A couple minutes. And more...

I also do a fair bit of Ruby, and while there are a reasonable number of gems for it, it's nothing like CPAN, and the stability/compatibility of them can be a headache. And they're often not as complete as CPAN counterparts. Ruby is still pretty young, and there still seem to be enough holes and bugs that you get many more version compatibility problems than I've seen with Perl.

Python may be somewhat better, but I haven't gotten the impression that it has a CPAN equivalent that's as comprehensive, either.

C and it's variants have a lot of libraries available, but they're at a whole different level than CPAN, and not nearly as useful for solving problems quickly.

Regarding the other part of that sentence ("and support here")-- I've posted very few questions here because Perl has been around long enough that nearly everything I've had trouble with or couldn't sort out could be resolved with a search. I end up using Perlmonks as a place to see what other things Perl can do that I don't need yet.

Apparently the link in the OP is going away, to be replaced by this new link. It's still quite a satisfying read.

Perl dead? I don`t believe so. First of all - Perl is easy. Yes, it`s not Python or Ruby. Even though they refer them for beginner languages ( which may be so in the basics ) they are getting tougher and tougher as you dive in. PHP is not so bad since it`s syntax resembles C++ and it`s OOP is easier than Perl`s. However, Perl is powerful, fast and very easy to learn, close to human language. You can write tons of useful code with just a small knowledge. Second - Perl refers to CONTEXT, something that other languages do not. If it looks like a function it is one, if it`s a scalar it is so. Other languages refer to variables as variables - storage of data, not context! This is important. IMHO, Perl and JavaScript are must know languages, that can accomplish almost any task together. I have positives to JAVA too because it is still general pps language, while pl, py, rb and php are still scripted/interpreted ones.

Back to topic: Perl is quite alive, amazon, imdb, tweeter and many other sites ( especially the ones with JSONP ) use it! Consider these facts before you back on Perl.

Yeh, Perl5 is easy. What is not, is to solve such problems the language implies, as everything works, but so many test for knowing if working good. That's one negative point, opposite of the positive point of: perl is easy and flexible. The thing is: why perl should be implemented on WWW platform, and not PHP. And, another question is: Why should Perl be used for doing that so many things you can do in Python? Before, some years ago, I thought: perl is damn important: it is installed in all unix like or bsd systems, but, not in windows, in which you can just install an active perl, or something else virtual machine. Now we have Parrot, and so on... the thing is: how many time is going to survive Perl, against the big amount of code being published in other scripting languages, which now a days, they're really power and useful. Also, they are "easy", or at least, easy is known as "powerful". I think, Perl6 is going to hit so strong, but people is not going to port their platforms in PHP, or so on, into Perl. And that, is a really negative for PerlWorld. (People will think: why should I waste my time into learning Perl, (which isn't easy at all, since it's huge), when I just can learn PHP, Python and SQL or SQL like. That's what I think. Cheers.