This may be true today, but there is a cadre of developers who will never find out. Perl was our bread and butter 10 years ago, but we moved on when Python and Ruby came to the forefront, and have never looked back. To get people interested in it again Perl can't just be 'pleasant' -- it needs to be better in the way Python and Ruby were better back then.

zoul, I don't think that was a value judgment or a criticism. I think strick's point is that a new programmer is far more likely to pick up Ruby or Python than Perl these days - (s)he's more likely to learn it in school, more likely to learn it for a popular MVC framework, etc.

I think that was a statement of historical fact, not a value judgement.

Perl does not have the sex appeal of Ruby or Python right now.

That's a shame, but that's the way it is.

For me, learning Ruby after years of knowing Perl was a resounding "meh." The documentation is substandard compared to Perl's and it doesn't really offer anything that Perl does except for less weirdness in the nooks and crannies and some improved syntactic sugar in some cases (though when I look at Ruby code all I see is "end end end end end").

And Python certainly has its own feel. But again it's not really any more powerful than Perl and offers nothing but an alternate simplified syntax. Programming in Python makes me really miss Perl--I always feel like I'm speaking baby talk instead of full blown English. Really elegant baby talk, but baby talk none the less.