Perl is dead. It's the new Lisp. I can say this as an ex-Perl hacker. But don't get me wrong—they have their niches. I look at this matter with ruthless practic

Perl is dead. It's the new Lisp. I can say this as an ex-Perl hacker. But don't get me wrong—they have their niches. I look at this matter with ruthless practicality: code is dead the moment you write it, there is no other way! The only thing that matters is what specific new, awesome code you're building right now in the real world, who is using it, and what they're doing with that code. So what if folks are speaking a dead language like Latin on a mysterious, magical island that may not even exist, where planes recurrently crash, where time travel is the normal mode of being, and where the line between the living and the dead is unclear. Great! Protect the light! One thing about the Perl community has always bugged me, and it pops up in any interview with any of the top Perl guys discussing Perl6. It's the notion that Perl code exists in some sort of weird theoretical hacker-academic world, where, like wannabe undiscovered rock stars, or an anointed Software priesthood, they keep saying "this code would be awesome if only everybody would come around, recognize it and then use it." Meanwhile everybody else says "Perl is write-only line noise." If you have to operate this way, I see it as using the wrong tool for the job—code for the living, not the dead! /anecdotal I do know I have no reason to go back to any version of Perl after having moved on to Ruby/Rails. It does seem like many more people are contributing code to newer, more bleeding-edge open source projects that have no equivalent in Perl. Especially for the web as it exists in 2010—a lot has changed! Grandma's CGI-style, old-school MVC framework(i.e. Catalyst+mod_perl) won't cut it now. So if you're doing something that requires the new, and you hit up Github or Stackoverflow to see what folks are using, the answer is never "here's a link to CPAN for this awesome Perl module that will blow your mind, help you finish your job, get you kudos from everybody, and get you laid." Instead it's here's the link to Github for this awesome ruby|python|javascript code. (Please prove me wrong here!)