The biggest issue that very-quickly appears, when I'm using “quick and simple” tools like PHP or Ruby, is that when you bump up against their intrinsic limitations ... a great big hole is ripped into the side of your ship and you sink straight to the bottom of the harbor.

The PHP executable, for instance, “is what it is.” Whatever you compiled into it, or more likely, what the hosting-company compiled into it. It's got “everything you'll ever need,” but when the moment inevitably comes when it doesn't... (and that moment will come...) ... you're scroo’d.

So, I think that what has been keeping Perl going for so long, in so many different applications, is precisely the fact that it isn't “quick and simple.” It's “general purpose.” And what makes it that way is CPAN. (Uhh, and Moose.) This is what gives it life-span.

The implementation decisions made with these “other” language were, of course, made quite deliberately and purposefully. But given that “the web” is changing so rapidly, I think that just a few years down the road there will be a really nice CPAN module to recompile PHP into Perl. :-)

(Oh, hell. What am I saying? This is Perl. It's already out there someplace, isn't it?)