Honestly, I've coded loads in perl, and I think the language has a great place in the Unix user's toolkit. I certainly use it for small scripts all the time. However, the 10,000th time I had to type 'man perldsc' because of the ugly hack that perl data structures and their syntax represent ("Access and printing of HoHoAoHoHoAoA", anyone?), I swore never to use it for complex projects. I learned PHP, and never looked back. Do yourself a favour and learn Ruby, Python or PHP. Don't use perl for complex web projects - it's simply not the problem domain it was designed for, and it shows. I mean, look at the code example on that framework's page: "my $self = shift;" .. who can be bothered with such cruft in 2011? Get with the program!
Uhm, sorry but that's nonsense. I know PHP and Ruby. The latter one very well. While Ruby is a great language I prefer Perl in most situations. While I consider both of them to be very good the primary reasons for choosing Perl are CPAN and the fact that it is older and therefor they already "fixed" a lot of shortcomings that other scripting languages have.
And yes, I know the benefits of Ruby's OO. I have used Smalltalk, so please don't tell me all the wonderful things you can do. I know them. But using Perl is like using a lot of experience for practical stuff. That's Perl's strength. There is a lot of knowledge in it and it's designed for practical stuff, the real world and not to look good or to be easy to learn. I still recommend Ruby to people who ask me about programming. Simply because it's better to understand a lot of things and I think it's easier if you start out with a programming language like Ruby. But staying with one language is just stupid. You will have a lot experience with a particular, but knowing different approaches to solve problems is even better.
Then there is this TIMTOWTDI dogma it that receives a lot of criticism, but I think it what keeps Perl alive. It makes it very flexible so you can use it like a completely different language. One can use it for small scripts or one-liners and huge applications. Also it's not true that there are no start up. DuckDuckGo is maybe the most popular example.
But this doesn't mean you should all use Perl. People do things in different ways and they think in different ways. It's not about choosing one single language that receives a lot of hype. Just learn and what's more important understand them. And with understanding I mean the philosophy. A lot of C people for example use Perl like it would be C and then say it's bad because it's like C and slower. GitHub is a nice way to find out how people are using a language and receive some inspiration. It's like everyone should at least try Small Talk and a language like LISP or Haskell. And everyone should learn what Assembly is all about. It will make you a better programmer no matter what language you'll be loosing in the end.
Oh, sorry. This is so off topic. I just wanted to know what stuff I might have missed, because it's really been a while since I had a look on other languages. Sorry!
