Whatever happened to Perl?

In my life I've probably written a few hundred thousand lines of Perl. I've modified and debugged roughly the same amount. Over the past few years, though, I don't think I've written more than a smattering of Perl code.

There's no doubt that Perl is the duct tape that holds the Internet together, functioning as everything from tiny glue and data-massaging scripts to full-blown content management systems such as Slashcode (the code that runs Slashdot), the Moveable Type publishing platform, and Bugzilla. Perl's claim to fame has always been that it makes easy things hard, and hard things possible, and it has functioned and thrived in that world since its inception in 1987.

But these days, the only time I fire up vim to write or modify Perl is when dealing with tools like Nagios and VMware that have a well-established Perl plug-in framework. Otherwise, I find I'm choosing different tools to fit the job.