>>when I'm actually working on a project in the language, what's the likelihood that someone who I'm working with or who worked on the project before me has rea

>>when I'm actually working on a project in the language, what's the likelihood that someone who I'm working with or who worked on the project before me has really messed up the code base Well, the quality of Perl code is very diverse, since a lot of system administrators are mangling the language... :-) Perl's general community seems to be very good (newbies went with PHP for quite a while). You can arguably see the CPAN as a result of that. (It is common to say -- "Perl is irrelevant, the killer app is CPAN!".) Another advantage is that Perl doesn't have so many embarrassing fanboys as certain other environments... (I believe the hype level regarding the scripting languages comes from them being so similar that they compete for the same niche.) Since Moose seems to standardize a solution to the OO syntax ugliness, the main Perl problem is IMHO the parameter passing to functions/methods. There are advantages and disadvantages to most everything. Edit: Small syntax/word choices. Removed ":-)" on comment that other environments have too many fanboys, language wars are such a time waste.