Yeah on a second reading I didn't want to come down on Perl too harshly even though I still have memories of that moment where I had to listen to someone tellin

Yeah on a second reading I didn't want to come down on Perl too harshly even though I still have memories of that moment where I had to listen to someone telling me "What, awk? We're doing Perl these days!" plus 3 not-so-pleasant projects over the years where we had to re-implement Perl systems. OTOH there are a couple of Perl tools that I still use (or whish I'd still be able to use), and I'm grateful those exist and Perl 5 is being maintained: Norman Walsh's SGML DTD documentation generator, the old citeseer code base (infinitely more useful than it's today), Debian's apache a2enmod/a2ensite management tools (that I've partly rewritten in shell) and apt tools. I even wouldn't hesitate to use RequestTracker tools (ticket management over mail) today even though it might not scale all that well.