Why Perl?

> i can't say i love the language at all

That is a sample of one. Try visiting a YAPC and you'll see a sample of 1000+ that is opposite to your's.

>> often can find the core developers in charge of some code

> i browsed a lot through CPAN and a huge part of modules hasn't been touched for years

What you said has nothing to do with what you quoted. CPAN allows you to email those authors and the vast majority will reply happily. And even in cases where they don't, it's easy to go on irc.perl.org and ask around in #perl.

> the IRC channels i know are more idle then other languages

You're not in the right channels. Try irc.perl.org or #perl on freenode.

> it's really untrue to say "there is nothing like it"

It is perfectly true. See this post for elaboration: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3238662

> often enough i think "mhh, should i even use this module? Nobody seems to care about this anymore"

Did you try asking around? Look for alternatives? Often that is because the remaining bugs are no dealbreakers (license nitpicks anyone?) or the modules have been determined to be crap (XML::Simple).

> But it tries to solve a problem that shouldn't be there in the first place.

I fully agree, but quite frankly, if you view this as a downside of Perl then you're just plain being short-sighted. The problem was created over a decade ago, at the conception of Perl 5; yet it is comfortably fixable without even changing core. And additionally, there is active work on fixing this issue in core:

https://github.com/stevan/p5-mop

> Want to have exceptions in Perl? Turns out the language doesn't have them.

Valid complaint. Exception::Class is a good tool for this, but i'd also like to have them in core. So far there has been no concensus on how to do it properly though without breaking backwards compatibility.

> The number one google hit

Google's search results for Perl are terrible and do not reflect the state of the community. Try searching for exception on CPAN itself.

> Perl thinks it's ok when you read an uninitialized variable. Want the script to terminate when this happens?

`use warnings FATAL => 'all';`

> Want to know if an element is in an array?

`my @hits = grep { $_ eq 'dogfood' } @array;`

Alternatively:

`use List::Util 'first'; my $has_dogfood = first { $_ eq 'dogfood' } @array;`

And this is in core.

> Unicode Support is horrible

I'll have to post this twice because you're so wrong:

http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2011/07/ms...

> My fun fact on Perl:

{{citation}}

> When your script/tool exceeds 100 lines of code, don't use Perl! Atleast not if there is the remote possibility of another human being having to understand or maintain it. Please!

Well how nice to show at the end at least that you're a troll.

Perl isn't easy to learn because it's difficult to become familiar with it. However, I found it enjoyable to work with. It's certainly a little quirky but for a dynamic language it is also quite malleable. My example is Moose: Perl didn't ship with an OO system but is flexible enough that Perl6's object model could be back ported. Don't like Moose? There are others. Or you could just use straight blessed hashes (which Python, Ruby, and others just put syntactic sugar around).

For a dynamic language it's pretty nice. But I don't think it's going to be winning many converts these days. The tower of babel had fallen long ago and people are starting to pick up the pieces again. Languages that stray too far from the squishy middle of collective wisdom, I fear, are likely to relegate themselves to history.

That being said, Perl does have an excellent community. And I really like reading Perl books. They're really fun where too many are either dry or over-compensating in quirkiness. Perhaps its those unixy origins that still pull me to it.

Perl has more extensive Unicode support than Javascript, PHP, Go, Ruby, Python, or Java. That alone disqualifies it from being "horrible". See http://98.245.80.27/tcpc/OSCON2011/gbu.pdf

> Want to have exceptions in Perl? Turns out the language doesn't have them.. There are modules.. all of them do some black magic trying to emulate this. The number one google hit (Error.pm) even states "Using the "Error" module is no longer recommended due to the black-magical nature of its syntactic sugar, which often tends to break.". And this is not some fancy 2011 language feature, it still isn't built in!

Exceptions are built in:

    eval {
       ....code...
       die("foo");  # throw exception
    }
    if ( $@ ) {
       ....this is exception handler...
    }

> Want to know if an element is in an array? There are some hideous for loops you could do, but nothing like "if X in Y".. best thing: Most recommended way to do this is to convert your array to a hash/dictionary and check for the key.. that's basic array handling.

Yes, Perl assumes that you did not sleep through "Introduction to Data Structures". If the operation of "find out of collection X contains element Y" is one that you need to do often and/or need to be more efficient than linear search, you should not be using an array.

I haven't found anything that makes GIS easy.

No Perl 6 implementation is mature enough to use for practical purposes.

LLVM probably won't help Perl 5, because Perl 5 lacks sufficient type information, and because LLVM's design really seems to want static languages. See also the JVM and the CLR.

Its odd syntax ... is terrible for long term maintainability.

I would never attempt to maintain code written in a language I don't know.