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Did you forget to paste in the statistics/facts that show me how wrong I am?
Start with Tim Bunce's "Perl Myths 2009": http://www.slideshare.net/Tim.Bunce/perl-myths-200909
Well, that seemed to have worked :)
Ask HN: What should I learn next? Python or Ruby/Rails?
31–32 of 32 posts
Re: Ask HN: What should I learn next? Python or Ruby/Rails?
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By your logic, we should not learn C because it's older than Perl and Python (why on earth is someone learning C in 2009).
No, C is different. Look, Perl was "the" fad language back in the 90s. No-one is building anything new with it today. So if you learn Perl, expect to be hired to maintain others' crappy sites. C is different because it's the foundation everything else is built on. I'm not trying to dis Perl here or anything; I'm just trying to state the nature of reality as I see it, so lower your spear, friend ..
Perl has great potential. The reason Rails and other newer languages are getting attention is solely because they're new. Rails is easier to start programming in by people who'll never understand the difference between a constant and a variable in their life. Other languages are invisible to them.
Does that mean Rails is bad? No! Every language has its merits and demerits. It's easier for a programming to learn them all than fight for a single language.
Perl has its own strong points, just like any other language.
"No-one is building anything new with it today."
Generalizations. So easy to make, and so imprecise nevertheless.