I avoided Perl up until about six weeks ago, when one of the best coders I know selected it for something we're working on. If it was anyone else I would have overruled the choice, but it turns out he was right.
It's an unmitigated disaster of a language, as a whole, but if your needs are a "scaffolding language" that can script something together quickly and you're using a lot of regex, I have to admit, it's a great choice.
It's an unmitigated disaster if you use it wrong - or at least if you use out of date techniques.
This is also true of C - consider things like scanf and other chunks of stdio that are preserved for compatibility but no developer in his right mind would use for new code.
Applications Perl5 written using MooseX::Declare and friends (see Task::Kensho for a good start at "and friends") is a much different thing to the high speed line noise-ish scripting perl that was the commonest sort a decade ago.
An informative comment from a really knowledgeable guy downvoted.
The comment in question was polite to a newbie flame without supporting data. The flame was upvoted... like a large number of flames without arguments/motivations.
I feel sad for HN.
OTOH, some language communities are hilariously pathetic in their fanboyism... :-)
It's an unmitigated disaster of a language, as a whole, but if your needs are a "scaffolding language" that can script something together quickly and you're using a lot of regex, I have to admit, it's a great choice.