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Similarly, I've two decades of Perl under my belt and it remains my go-to to quick-and-dirties. But in my field, Python has the mind-share these days and ease of collaboration beats language puritanism, so Perl's on a one-way trip. The reality is that when people leave Perl, they don't come back.

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I hear you, but do you really think the people who spent the last decade+ working on Perl 6 would have done so because of love of the language alone? That would be a terrible waste of time and talent. I think we will see something of a Perl revival when people see just what they can do with Perl 6. I'm hopeful, but at the same time, you yourself know how useful Perl can be for things like one-liner quick, clever hacks and even better yet, I don't think anything beats Perl for rapid prototyping, even if it means the final product is written in C/C++.

While I agree that Python is seemingly everywhere, I don't agree that people don't come back to Perl. Perl 5 gets better every release, and perl6 really is finally around the corner. Lots of exciting stuff coming!!!

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