What is Modern Perl

Actually some of your recommendations are pending getting rid of old code (we simply can't move everything to PSGI when we have the mixture of old and new code we have, so it's CGI only for now still). However we are giving hard thought as to the best way to do so and I expect that as we continue that process things will become more PSGI friendly until it is just a matter of changing one sub somewhere.

I should note you have convinced Josh Drake on the merits of DBIx::Class for other projects though.

Finally I think it is worth noting that I think that in the 1.4 tree we've come out (I hope) of the contageous effect of the bad SL code, and so the coding styles which evolved so much during LSMB 1.3 are being formalized and moved to Moose in 1.4.

Minimalism, is both an advantage and a curse. You may be able to learn python quickly, and that is because the syntax and semantics are designed with a goal to do that. But unfortunately that is not the only problem programmers have, Learning how to program is problem only for first few weeks of your programming career, there after its hardly a problem. Beyond that verbosity becomes a curse, once you begin to understand what 10's of lines of code do, you wonder why you even need 10's of lines of code when something can be expressed more elegantly.

In my experience people complain about learning Perl for the same reasons why they don't get awk/sed/tr and other text processing utilities. Tools like that are a little difficult to start with, but offer tremendous advantages. Skip learning them, and suddenly you put yourself in a situation where you start your eclipse and write Java programs for every small bit of text processing task. That sucks up your time, effort and code forever. So its better to learn tools that are better designed to solve such problems.

>>and I'm not sure why Perl would be better.

Perl and Python are both excellent languages, so you find a range of problems that can be solved in both languages well. But try solving problems that Perl was specifically designed to solve, Pick up the book Higher Order Perl by Mark Jason Dominus(Its Free) and see for yourself how Perl helps you solve a certain kind of problems. I'm sure its the same case with Python too! Its good for academia, as its easy psuedocode.

Problems that can be solved in both Python and Perl can obviously be solved in any of them.

>>So to my mind, Perl is something of a sysadmin tool, better than bash and very useful for a workload focussed on system and file processing, on *nix, without much service to HTTP. I'd love to hear how it pays returns for people more focussed on back-end support of web development.

You have just described a very small subset of problems Perl can solve. Perl is used for developing very large application in nearly almost every industry.

Web programming != Entire Programming world.

Much of the software world never writes a web page. And they do programming too. But like us they don't tweet/Facebook/blog every time they finish writing a class.

But there's probably a great deal more value to be had to knowing just one of the big three scripting languages (Perl|Python|Ruby) deeply than in knowing just a smattering of each.