Actually, the main cause of my caution is being burned by other languages during the learning process.

I'm not asking for a bucket of water, I'd just prefer to some extra warnings given so I'm aware of the things that don't appear to be hot.

I can then stop put some heat resistant gloves on first. ;o)

I realise that Perl isn't perfect, but it is probably the closest thing available when working with text - mostly because that's what it was originally designed for.

The main use I will be putting it to is creating static HTML documents from a database. My intention is to update them once a week or so, and as I would be the one administrating the database and resulting Web site, it wouldn't be time-critical or multi-threaded.

With that use in mind, it's hard to think of another language that would be more suitable. So yes, for this task I do rate Perl much more highly than the alternatives.

That's not to say I'd choose it to create a Quake clone, or a replacement for Windoze. :o)