I use perl, at home, at work, and I've been using it for over a decade. I recently switched job titles and had to relearn The Web outside of the old CGI forms that I used to know back in the crusty old days of web 1.0.

Handrolled mysql connections and 50k lines of code aren't good practice anymore - not that they ever were, but it was at least accepted and common practice. I've started using MongoDB as well, and its collection of documents metaphor makes a lot of sense when you can pair JSON and perl data types so easily.

Perl has moved on since the early 5.008 days, but the …