There does seem to be a certain amount of truth to the "oh, you kids, we were doing that in Perl ten years ago" attitude I occasionally run into. (Sort of like

There does seem to be a certain amount of truth to the "oh, you kids, we were doing that in Perl ten years ago" attitude I occasionally run into. (Sort of like Lispers, except they invented whatever cool feature you think is new back in 1958.) But it's hard to justify switching from something else to Perl, and indeed I think your rephrasing -- "it's familiar and there aren't really massive advantages to using the other languages" -- about sums this up. (Largely why I've been using PHP for a current project, despite agreeing with a lot of the criticisms people make of it.) I'm not sure I can see explicitly choosing to learn "modern" Perl to start a new project in, though. Personally I prefer Python over Ruby, unlike the author here, but I prefer both of them to Perl and its extremely... eclectic syntax. I once failed a job interview because I joked that Perl was a read-only language, but it really frequently is.