I am surprised by the number of people here praising Perl. I understand it was useful for its time, but the reason why programmers aren't using it is because it's a crap of a language. Fine, it's pretty crazy how much you can do in Perl with just few lines of code, but who cares about that except you? It's an active struggle to make Perl code readable and it not turning into a mess.
Perl not only makes it the syntax difficult with all the absurdities (special variables, so many prefixes $,@,%, terse function names, tens of ways to do one thing), it also makes it impossible to Google. Imagine spending your whole afternoon trying to dig what "($fc) = /^(.)/" does; a maintainer's nightmare. I am not that old but from a little searching, it seems to me Perl always had a bad reputation, and for good reasons.
Perl not only makes it the syntax difficult with all the absurdities (special variables, so many prefixes $,@,%, terse function names, tens of ways to do one thing), it also makes it impossible to Google. Imagine spending your whole afternoon trying to dig what "($fc) = /^(.)/" does; a maintainer's nightmare. I am not that old but from a little searching, it seems to me Perl always had a bad reputation, and for good reasons.