I've recently seen mentioned in a post here an interesting article by Simon Cozens, entitled "Ten Perl Myths", which I had never read but dates back to February 23, 2000 and yet is IMHO still perfectly fine for the time being: in it, the author analyzes much common FUD about Perl and brings on well thought counter arguments - in his own words, "that's not all the myths you'll hear about Perl; I haven't time to list them all, but there's a lot of disinformation out there." Indeed they're if not the top ten, as he claims, certainly topical ones, and even if one may add further comments to the various entries, he pretty much pinpointed with terseness and clarity the main issues and what they really are like or are not like.

Here, I'd rather concentrate on a brief analysis of the same purported shortcomings of Perl in the perspective of Perl 6, in which case there are additional fears about which it can be interesting to read in a thread as What's wrong with Perl 6?, and of course some of the things said there will also apply here.

This umbrella node will serve as a toc to the individual entries, which are as follows and will get gradually updated as they get into existence:

• Perl is hard
• Perl looks like line noise
• Perl is hard because it has regexps
• Perl is hard because it has references
• Perl is just for Unix
• Perl is just for one-liners - can't build `real' programs with it.
• Perl is just for CGI
• Perl is too slow
• Perl is insecure
• Perl is not commercial, so it can't be any good

Eventually, I'd like to sum up all of what will be said in the various discussions in a single article.