Why Perl ?
"Perl is, by and large, a digested and simplified version of Unix. Perl is the Cliff Notes of Unix" - Larry Wall
I could never really get myself to learn sed, awk, zsh, grep, find, m4, pipes, xargs, tee, cut, paste, yacc, lex, various IPC or even C for that matter. I ought to.
In practice, in almost most all cases I use perl.
Perl equivalents to the above are psed, jawk, ack, IPC::Run, IPC:: ..., IO::All, ppt, A real parser, reference counted pointers(if you ever miss c), POSIX and even a shell. You can also, easily write yourself one script that exactly does what you want to.
The other thing that makes me keep coming back to perl are the books. I have read every book of every programming language out there, but I always end up re-reading perl books ... because the other books put me to sleep.
- The Camel Book
- Perl Cookbook
- Perl Hacks
- Perl Best Practices
- Mastering Regular Expressions
- Extreme Perl
- Modern Perl
- Higher Order Perl
- Scheme in Perl
- Master Algortihms in Perl
Almost all the books are lucidly written. The last two books are underrated.
The perl cultural traditions
... not to forget that perl is pomo
On top of that I find perl excellent for
That's it, I guess.
I blog about Perl.
I use a few of those tools a lot -- it's pretty common for me to do a 'find . -type f | xargs perl -pie' type of chain to process a bunch of files in a directory tree. But I agree on the text-manipulation tools like awk and sed. I learned them once upon a time, but they're just enough different from Perl to be confusing. If I'm going as far as splitting lines or using regexes, it's just easier to bring out the big comfortable hammer.
I feel the same. :)
In terms of web development, I use Perl exclusively for it. Mostly Jifty, Mojolicious::Lite and Dancer. But I do work on sixteencolors.net, which is a Catalyst application.
All-in-all; I find Perl to be an amazing web development language with many solid frameworks to choose from.