There really isn't any point to this rant. Maybe I'll find this in a couple years when I feel like I need to switch to another language, and I'll not waste my time.

I think the key is to wait for a problem that you can't easily solve in Perl, or that you can solve more easily in another language. Switching to LISP for web development is just going to make LISP look bad - Perl definitely has that problem licked.

I was in favor of switching to Erlang for a project at a prior job. Erlang isn't a better general-purpose language than Perl, not even close (thank you CPAN!). But it does offer really convenient distributed, fault-tolerant multi-processing. The next time I'm working on a parallel-processing server with high up-time requirements I'll be tempted again. It's certainly do-able with Perl but you pretty much have to roll it from scratch.

Similarly, if anyone ever asks you to write a client side GUI (and you can't talk them out of it), I think you'd be foolish to do it with Perl. Sure, it can be done but it won't be easy. Switching to something built for the task - Java, C#, Air, etc - is probably worth the effort.

I guess the biggest challenge to a comfortable Perl programmer is being able to realize when it's time to find a new tool. Perl can do so much so easily that we can very easily slip into thinking Perl can do everything!

-sam