Why do Python/Ruby/X people get such a kick out of language wars?
Your response was:
Python people value doing complicated things with simple code. Perl people value doing simple things with obscure language features, then basking in the glow of being called a "wizard".
Methinks there's a disconnect somewhere here.
There's no war to fight. Perl has its place. I might even use Perl again if I need a throwaway 10-liner.
They are all irrelevant monikers.
Use whatever works for YOU. Taking the conversation any further is as pointless as any other religious war discussion.
Basically, "Perl" is a very large community, and different people in the community use Perl for different things. Some just want to have fun and others have real engineering problems to solve and are solving them with Perl. Perl is welcoming to everyone. It's a shame that people think the playful applications of Perl make it unsuitable for real work.
I write more perl than anything else but I work in shell, make, perl and C regularly depending on what level I'm trying to work at (and often think in lisp for prototyping).
UNIX is my IDE. perl5 is my VM. CPAN is my language.