I have written maybe 100-200k lines in Perl. > Similarly all the crazy special variables @_,$_, $a, $b, $&, $', $+, @+, @- %-, $^R, $., $/, $|, $\, $", $; Of

I have written maybe 100-200k lines in Perl. > Similarly all the crazy special variables @_,$_, $a, $b, $&, $', $+, @+, @- %-, $^R, $., $/, $|, $\, $", $; Of these the only four most Perl programmers should ever use are @_, $_, $a, and $b. The rest are great for advanced manipulations (probably along with the local keyword) but are best thought of as configuration tweaks to the runtime. > On top of that it died at version 5 because version 6 never came out. Perl 6 did come out. It just doesn't have that much of a community and has about the same relationship to C++ does to C. Perl 6 won't kill perl 5. Ever. Perl is dead in some environments (and good riddance), but it is a very powerful development environment for others and I doubt it will ever die per se.