Well the link in the original post sheds some light on this - it is a refreshingly flame-free discussion of the pros and cons of Perl/Ruby/Python. Lots of interesting stuff, with only 1 or 2 "Haha, that Perl code will give you nightmares " remarks.

The OP in that discussion said something like "Perl is ugly & encourages bad code", others said stuff about it being hard to maintain. I don't know how much this is considered opinion, and how much is just what people have been saying a lot of. All these languages are pertty flexible

Some of the Ruby examples made me wonder - I mean, there were several different Ruby solutions to the original problem, and if someone finds them *all* immediately intuitive, I'd like to shake his/her hand...At least 2 were a mess. So much for Perl encouraging bad code...

One Perl guru used to say that each new language you learn teaches you something about the one you know best. I shall certainly try and make time for some more Python and Ruby (and Lisp actually, and Object CAML is being talked about..:)). But I suspect I won't ditch Perl in any hurry...

I'm sure many make the leap because they just want to be doing the latest thing, or bend to the pressure of all the Perl naysayers. Maybe if I were younger or smarter I would try to learn a couple of languages, as many Monks have recommended.

I'm sure every Perlie questions their choice of language occasionally, but that's a good thing. Who knows, they just might find a better tool, but for me Perl is doing it just fine...for now.

Well, I can share a bit. I do not use perl for web development. I use PHP. I love perl, for everything except the web. I have tried mod_perl, python and ruby, but PHP just seemed completely geared to making web pages and making them easy to develop and maintain.

From my perspective there aren't many things that a web language has to have. It has to have great database access (and that's why I use adodb in php). It has to be able to set/get all the variables (cookies, sessions, system, get, post etc..) that are available in a web environment in an easy way. It has to be modular. I could give mod_perl another go because I haven't given it in a go in 7+ years and I'm sure it's a lot more mature, but why? I have yet to run into a problem writing a web page in PHP for a solution.

The command line is an entirely different matter. And I will cry big tears if I'm forced to leave PERL for my ETL work for some fly-by-night language. In fact, my company told us once that we had to use Java. We spent time and energy writing our applications in Java, but in the end we convinced management to allow us to switch back to Perl. I don't want to get into a !java discussion, but let's just say that I didn't find it to be geared to command line ETL work.