That’s actually an extremely attractive proposition to work in a Perl shop. It’s the same deal as Lisp or Haskell or Erlang shops: you know you’ll be surrounded by top notch talent!

I think that’s really weird. Perl was mostly replaced by PHP, and nobody thinks PHP programmers are any good.

I understand your angle but the reason is not in the language's technicality but in the community and its culture. Most Perl speakers are seasoned hackers who are great at low level programming and use Perl when C was an overkill; their documentation skills are also noteworthy. Just my observation; I've read Perl docs (just type ('perldoc perltoc') if you're on a non-Windows box) and giggled at some of the funny remarks and admired pithy writing.

That's not very sound logic.

Yeah you can’t replace a medieval torture device with a server side scripting language. It just doesn’t make any sense.

I worked in Perl for a while and I'm the worst programmer I know, lol.

Perl was my first programming language. After more than two decades, it is still the language I feel the most efficient in. Glad to see Perl is still alive and kicking !

It was my first language, too, that I learned to write “serious” programs in. I just didn’t think a prominent modern company would choose Perl as their main language. Props to them.

Such choices always come down to personal preferences of tech founders.

I wrote my first web apps in Perl, way back in the 90's! "use CGI" anyone?

Same here. I also built a few web backends using Apache mod_perl, which was insanely fast compared to CGI.

PHP started as mod_perl app, too.

Oh yes, those were the days!