This year, I begin my nineteenth year of professional programming with Perl. It seems that I just can quit you, Perl.

Not that there is a compelling reason to do so. Sure, there are a lot of "hot" newish language/frameworks out there, like node.js, ruby on rails and python/django. And those tools are worth getting to know, not the least of which reason to do so is in the pursuit of paying gig.

Popularity of a technology is mostly important when you start a project and when all technologies are equally alien to you. In my case, Perl is home. It is the tool I can use nearly…