"Perl requires that you learn a bit before you can be comfortable reading/writing it naturally. Like Japanese Katakana characters or the Cyrillic alphabet, a li

"Perl requires that you learn a bit before you can be comfortable reading/writing it naturally. Like Japanese Katakana characters or the Cyrillic alphabet, a little investment goes a very long way. It's not nearly as alien as it appears at first glance." This is, no doubt, true. But if people find that for a lesser investment (in say Python or Ruby) they can get all the (or almost all the) benefits of learning perl, it is natural they prefer those languages. If a hypothetical English speaker were to be given the choice of learning French or Japanese and if he could get his work done with either language equally well (this is where programming languages differ from spoken languages) why is it a problem that someone chooses to learn French (an English speaker could be fluent in french in year or so, Japanese would take years) instead of Japanese? A Chinese speaker might prefer to learn Japanese vs French and that's fine too. Focussing on perl specifically, unless I am maintaining a legacy codebase or I have a situation where libraries I need exist only in perl (and not, say in Python) why should I learn perl in preference to (say) Python? I can imagine making a case for learning Haskell in preference to Python (or vice versa!) but perl Python and Ruby are largely equivalent in practice and at least to some people Python is easier to read than perl. "Some people think Perl is a good deal more expressive and powerful for them. A whole lot more people would if they managed to get past their initial reaction." I agree. The counterpoint is that there are equally powerful and expressive languages where I don't need to get past the initial reaction. To some people aesthetics matter. And aesthetics is subjective.