In the workplace, Perl solved an annoying problem for us, twenty years ago. Back then, we needed to support Windows (different versions) plus many different Unix flavours (e.g. Solaris, AIX, SCO, SGI, Digital Unix, ...) and Perl proved to be much more portable, efficient, scalable and enjoyable for glue code than a motley mix of Bourne/Korn shell and .BAT. As for why, see Unix shell versus Perl.
Being forced to learn Perl for work, I found that I really enjoyed the recreational fun culture of Perl obfu and golf and hung out on the now dormant fwp (fun with perl) mailing list back then ... and (later) Perl Monks. I spent many happy hours tinkering with Saturn and playing Perl golf. I just really enjoyed (and still do) the sense of fun and community around Perl.
Soon after I'd mastered Perl, it became clear to me that Perl, Ruby and Python were essentially equivalent and we could have equally solved our shell woes by using Python or Ruby instead of Perl ... though by then, it didn't make sense to spend the dollars on rewriting our many working Perl scripts in Python or Ruby.
Over the years, I've been saddened by Perl's gradual decline in popularity -- tiobe, for example, shows that Python now dominates both Perl and Ruby in terms of popularity (update: despite breaking backward compatibility). In case you're interested, I enjoy both Ruby and Python almost as much as Perl (and much more than Unix shell or Javascript). I was also saddened by what happened to Perl 6 in its formative years.
Update:
Though we've still got a lot of working Perl scripts, most of the younger guys prefer to use Python or Javascript/Node.js/Deno nowadays ... which I totally understand (2023 update: ... they're also eager to try Infrastructure as code tools, such as Puppet and Ansible ... and new DevOps tools, such as Jenkins and Kubernetes and Apache Ant, often requiring JVM languages such as Groovy ... and Microservices ... and trendy new statically typed languages, such as Rust, and Golang, and V, and ... :)
After seeing talexb's reply: yes, I too attended Perl mongers meetings in the early years and had the good fortune to meet Larry and Audrey Tang, aka audreyt, who stayed in my Sydney house for a few days (leaving behind one of her earrings :), her phenomenal talent on display for all to marvel at (wow, I see she is now a famous Taiwanese politician!). Also met Bjarne Stroustrup at a C++ conference. Both Larry and Bjarne were gentlemen and gentle men; they both impressed me enormously with their humbleness, honesty and integrity. Unlike talexb, I'm not a huge fan of C and definitely not PHP. Though I enjoyed using Simula and FORTRAN (for Defence Department battlefield simulations) in the 1970s, and 4GLs and Pascal on CTOS and COBOL on IBM Mainframes in the 1980s, C++ was the first language I fell in love with and has been my primary work programming language since 1988 -- I've been impressed at the way Bjarne has lovingly shepherded its development and modernisation, year after year, decade after decade.
References Added Later
In reply to Re: [RFC] What is [pP]erl to you, and how has this changed for you over the years (if it has)?
by eyepopslikeamosquito
in thread [RFC] What is [pP]erl to you, and how has this changed for you over the years (if it has)?
by perlfan
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