Perl is by far the most 'fun' language I've ever programmed. Once you get familiar with a lot of the idioms, it is extremely powerful, and the amount of process

Perl is by far the most 'fun' language I've ever programmed. Once you get familiar with a lot of the idioms, it is extremely powerful, and the amount of processing you can do in a line or two of perl would take 10 lines in Java and 20 in C. And 15 years ago, these were the languages it was competing against. That being said, I rarely use it anymore, and the reason is that once you stop using it daily, you quickly forget all the quirks of its syntax and its powerful idioms, and often I can't even read it without having to Google for help. And that is why it is dying - there are too many ways to do things. Compare this with Python, which I've never really used as a day to day language, but every few months have to deal with some smaller project written in Python. I can jump in and get work done immediately because there are so few ways to do things. It is mostly just iterating through dictionaries, whereas Perl pushes you to think of everything as a regex or text.