Perl is a ground breaking language, and I never douted that. Perl totally changed the face of scripting language, changed what scripting language can do. Perl is performance, not only that Perl is fast, but also Perl allows you to develop your application more rapidly.

"Web polls are a lousy way to obtain truth."

I 100% agree with Zaxo. For technical ideas, you don't sanity check or judge them by the number of people support them, but by their qualities.

Comparing with other types of polls, web poll falls in the lousiest area, as the majority of people who visit a certain web site usually already have their mind set solidly established, and their oppionions are usually biased. You come to here ask people whether Perl is better, or Java is better, which one will the majority vote? If you go to a Java site, ask the same question, you will definitely get the opposite answer.