I've been using Perl for years, it's a pretty neat language. It can seem a little esoteric at first, but once you get into Perl it's pretty intuitive. I don't k

I've been using Perl for years, it's a pretty neat language. It can seem a little esoteric at first, but once you get into Perl it's pretty intuitive. I don't know how many times when I was learning it the I thought "this seems like this should work", tried it and it did. I'm not bashing any other languages (I think it's pointless, the "best" programming language it the one that makes you productive) but Perl definitely has it strong points: - Great for sys admin stuff. Working with files and external programs is a breeze. *NIX administration is how I got into Perl. Perl is a devops friend. - Handy for processing anything text based. Tedious tasks like screen scraping is straight forward. - Versatile. Don't like X in Perl? Someone else probably thought the same thing and made a module for it. Even low level stuff like Perl subroutines and OO have alternatives. As they say in Perl TIMTOWTDI (there is more than one way to do it). - So many modules! Write less code and get stuff done fast. - Low level voodoo is easy. Perl exposes many of the internals of the interpreter so things like adding grammars and making DSL's doesn't seem like voodoo. - Multi-paradigm. Doesn't force a programming style on you. - Complex data types. Not that everything is unicorns and rainbows in the world of Perl. - Some features/syntax can feel outdated or seem "clunky" for lack of a better term. - Versatility is a double-edged sword. You can write code so bad/evil it can summon an elder god and Perl will happily execute it. - So much punctuation! If your new to the world of Perl, try out Perl 6. It has all the cool features of Perl 5 and ditches most of the weird stuff but has all the modern features you would expect from other new(er) languages.