My perspective on Perl is that it's like a Dremel tool. If you've ever had a household project that requires a tool you don't have or skill you don't know, you

My perspective on Perl is that it's like a Dremel tool. If you've ever had a household project that requires a tool you don't have or skill you don't know, you can usually take your Dremel out, dig through the gift pack of attachments that you received for Christmas, and find a way to do what you need to do. Will the results be pretty? No. Is it the best way to get the job done? Probably not -- but it's good enough. Perl's great because it has the power to do lots of things, quickly, and without alot of drama. It's dangerous because it's just good enough to keep some hastily written program around too long. Many "black box" processes written in unintelligible Perl by persons unknown haunt data centers all over the globe. I enjoyed the time I spent with Perl immensely. But I spent it as a individual sysadmin/DBA turned developer integrating lots of complex systems on multiple platforms a decade ago. (For better or for worse, some of those apps are still working!) For a team of programmers in 2011, there are probably tools out there that will do the job better for the same price.