Perl turns 34 today.

[rcjordan]

So says the innertubes.

[Brad]

I once wandered into the Perl forum at WmW just to lurk.  I heel and toed it out of there as fast as I could. hhh  I didn't understand one tiny bit of what they were saying.  I did like Perl scripts tho.

[ergophobe]

I started with FORTRAN and Pascal and PDP11 assembly language, then took a long hiatus from programming until I got into PHP and a bit of Scheme. The effect is that I just never used PERL (or Java for that matter).

[rcjordan]

I can read and sometimes modify Perl.  I like it because it IS readable.  I once had LM convert a large, working C+ script to Perl just because I liked being able to see the script code and could maintain it myself.

Javascript is also readable, sorta, and I can sometimes work with it. But js is crazy.

[littleman]

>But js is crazy.

It's booming right now though; with node.js it is becoming the one language that seems to be able to do it all.

Perl was so great around the turn of the century, I never got into perl 6 though.  It is too different form 5 and I don't really see any advantage of it over other languages.   

[rcjordan]

>>But js is crazy.
>It's booming right now though ...node

Yeah, and the userscript community.  I stay eyeball-deep in stackoverflow & github when I'm trying to cobble together a browser script.

[ergophobe]

>>But js is crazy.

Enclosures, anonymous functions, etc can make it rather hard to read if, like me, you're not adept. But yes, it is booming. I know serious, strong programmers who now code full-time in some flavor of JS - node.js, React, Angular and plain old JS - for pretty much all their work