One of perl's biggest pro's is also partly to blame for its occasional poor rep. It's easy and fast to solve problems in perl, and you can learn it as you go along. Unfortunately, that means that there is a lot of code out there written with a very limited knowledge of the language, and limited knowledge of programming - I know, I've seen a lot, and been responsible for a fair bit myself.

Rather than advocating use of perl over other languages and hence getting into bun fights with Java/C/C++/Haskell/Lisp etc lovers, we'd surely be better getting our own house in order, and advocating use strict;use warnings; to people using perl already, to combat that 'crappy scripting language' reputation that's so ill deserved.