Why promote it here?
It has caused enough damage, particularly in the bioinformatics community where it is required/used by people who don't know any better.
From http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2002/01/02/bioinf.html:
"But Perl programmers may be surprised to find that their handsome language has become one of the most - if not the most popular - of computer languages used in bioinformatics."
I will bite.
I think this perception is prevalent because Perl was most popular before programmers knew how to program. (We still don't, but we are doing much better than we were doing 10 years ago.) Perl was especially easy to use, and attracted many non-programmers (or programmers who "didn't care"), and this left a bad taste in many people's mouths.
The thing is, everything of that era sucked. C sucks ("Segmentation fault (core dumped)"), C++ sucks (diamond inheritance, no type safety), Java sucks (no way to reuse non-trivial code), PHP sucks (no lexicals!), etc. The common thread there is that it's very easy to write bloated, unmaintainable code. Perl made that easy too.
Fast-forward 10 years, and Perl has made an attempt to solve these problems. You can still use all your old Perl code, libraries, and skills... but you can also do OO correctly, you can also test your code easily, and you can also easily share your code with the community. The good parts were kept, the ugly parts are pushed to the background, and the bad parts were replaced.
Other languages have done a bit of this too; C++ has boost and C++0x, C has the Boehem GC, eliminating many memory management problems (but it sill has no type safety), Java is being replaced with things like Scala and Clojure (which let you use old code but not suffer with the Java language's stagnation), and so on. In the end, though, I don't think any of these languages have made enough progress. (Partially because the communities are convinced that their language Is Perfection, and haven't felt any pressure to fix things. Perl is constantly derided as The Worst Language Ever, but we just can't seem to stop using it, so there is a lot of pressure to fix things. This pressure has resulted in a lot of good work on the VM, and a lot of exceptional libraries.)
So the point of my rant, I guess, is that Perl from 10 years ago is not what Perl is today. You can still use your 10-year-old skills, libraries, and applications, though... but when you want to do something new, there are tools available to help you Do It Right. More Right than, say, Java or C, anyway. (Moose is significantly more featureful than even CLOS now! Java and C++ look like a first-year CS student's first attempt at designing an object sytem. That's not the fault of Java and C++'s designers, BTW; the computer science community simply had no idea how OO worked when Java and C++ were implemented. The difference is that Java and C++ have kept their broken object systems, but Perl has replaced its.)
There are a lot of people that don't like a language (or application) for some small flaw, and feel the need to completely rewrite everything from scratch. ("I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.")
This is very time-consuming, however, and the results tend not to be particularly compelling. The Perl community has shown that incremental improvements work a lot better than throwing everything away and starting over. We kept some historical baggage, of course, but if you are willing to ignore that, you have a language that competes with the best of them. (BTW, Perl6 is a great example of how difficult it is to design and implement a new programming language. Even with some of the smartest minds in computer science working on it constantly, it is still not complete. Programming languages are big projects; most of the new languages that we've seen crop up lately are extremely limited in scope or features, and while stable, will probably never be as popular as the "worse" langauges.)
BTW, just so it sounds like I am not fanboi-ing for Perl; Haskell is another example of successfully-applied incremental improvement. As an example, Haskell 98's type system doesn't allow overlapping instances. Instead of creating a brand new programming language to address that problem, the GHC folks just fixed GHC's type system, and allowed you to turn on the fixed version when you want it. The good stuff was kept, the bad stuff was pushed back into the realm of "historical compatibility", and the language moved forward as a result. (See section 7.6.3.3 here, if you care: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/users_guide/type... )
Anyway, it's a shame that you are letting people from 10 years ago get in the way of being a productive programmer. Throwing away an entire language and a community every time someone writes a bad script is not always the answer.
Why expect the world to conform to your point of view?
Your post might have been useful if you had taken the time to list concrete things about Perl that you object to. As it stands, you just whine that someone posted something you don't like. That's pretty silly.
What makes this statement true?
> Perl is by far the worst widely used language that I have ever seen.
Your posts in this thread indicate strong feelings about Perl. If you can't describe what you feel, though, nobody will be able to agree with you; they will just slowly get the impression that Perl detractors are a bunch of wackos. I think that's the exact opposite effect that you are trying to achieve, so... think about it for a bit, and write down some reasons why Perl is bad. (Failing that, write down some reasons why you don't like Perl.)
Basically, we are trying to have an intelligent discussion about programming here, and "Try google." adds nothing to it.
If you want to provide evidence that 'perl is a bad language' feel free. Of course, you'll be handicapped by the fact that there is no really widely accepted definition of a good or bad language, but you should at least be able to argue it one way or the other. You just seem to continually asserting that it's bad, hoping that it'll prove your point.
This is wrong -- read StackOverflow some time, and you will find that people write horribly, horribly bad code in Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, C#, Haskell, ... anything. Bad programmers enable bad programming. The best a language can do is to make sure that the bad code is indented consistently.
(Have you read 1984? Replacing negative words with positive words does not make the world a positive place.)
I think there's a reason that Perl is still the number one scripting language, and it's good to see that development on it is still progressing.
Anything that is Turing-complete will do?
Not a great defense. Perl is a great language for bioinformatics, and is also a great language used the right way. It's not persuasive to assume anyone who is critical of something cannot use it. Many good workmen criticism tools only to make better tools.
The thing is, it's like complaining that duct tape is poorly used.. which is often true, but duct tape still rules ;-) Perl has more than its fair share of problems but it has bound a lot of the Web together over the years. (Oh, and more recently there are some really clean, well structured Perl projects out there, but.. too little too late IMHO.)
So you're saying that every time someone figures out a new way to program, they should throw away their tools and rebuild everything from scratch? No thanks.
The reason I stick with Perl is because I can use all the "bad code" that happens to work, and replace it as time permits (or as I need to maintain and extend it).
If you want to keep using Perl and enjoy the new stuff, that's great. For those who jumped ship and got up to speed on a new platform (as I did after 8 years of Perl), I don't see much reason to come back. Even Ruby's lacklustre performance is almost on a par with Perl now - http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al... - and Python is developing at a great pace.
I think Perl has better libraries, but learning those and discarding your experience with one of the other languages is probably not much of a net gain.
But why repeat that, since it is a standard answer in all these endless discussions?
Let me instead note one big advantage for Perl: There are much fewer embarrassing trolls doing language wars.
(You seem to think that the programming community knows what "good practices" are. I have not seen any evidence of that.)
Most of Perl's bad reputation (e.g. that it's a "write only" language) is simply because the community around the language reinforces that style of coding.
As of late, I think Perl has gone more in the Python direction, and Ruby has gone more in the "old Perl" direction. (It is mildly amusing to watch the Ruby community make all the mistakes that Perl made 10 years ago, especially with its advocates' constant hatred for Perl.)
I recently had to explain to someone what "_" means in Perl (not to be confused with $_ or @_). It was simple for me to answer, because I had the experience. But someone seeing it for the first time wouldn't exactly be able to Google it, or look it up in a man page; who would think to look for it under "perldoc -f stat"? What's more, this particular short-cut, while useful, has a side effect: if someone maintaining the code inserts a stat on a different file in between the original stat and the "_", then the source of the "_" changes. For a single character in a script, that's a heck of a lot of barriers for a new programmer.
Pretty much everyone I work with has been burned by being handed some legacy Perl to maintain and as a result we are very reluctant to do any new work with it. The payoff for rewriting in Python is that the technical debt incurred for using Perl in the first place is repaid.
If you choose not to take advantage of those tools when writing a Perl 5 application, you bear the risk yourself. How does that reflect on the language or the ecosystem?