I've worked with Perl for many years and still actively develop for it at work. IF you deliberately ignore some of the crufty parts of the language (ie you fol

I've worked with Perl for many years and still actively develop for it at work. IF you deliberately ignore some of the crufty parts of the language (ie you follow "Modern Perl") it's... ok. Perfectly possible to write good code with it if you understand the quirks, but you have to be strict to avoid the stereotypical "line noise", and not everyone is. Some parts are legitimately awesome though: Moose, for example, is a fantastic OO model that I wish was usable in other languages (although you do pay for it with long load times). However, the ecosystem and community have been struggling to keep up with the rest of the world for a while now, and where you used to be able to assume that CPAN would yield something useful for most tasks, that's becoming increasingly untrue, and a lot of projects are now abandoned. I still reach for it for small things, but I wouldn't start a large project with Perl now, I don't think.