Reading this list, seeing people talk about CPAN, I was tempted to talk about the community of Perl and how gosh darn cool it was. but then I realized that if I was stuck on a desert isle with no connection to the world, no CPAN, no PerlMonks, no web pages, Perl would STILL be a cool language.

Back to my original point. Traditionally, 'powerful' languages had a steep learning curve even to do the basics and were rather unforgiving. I think we can all agree that this doesn't fit Perl. On the other hand, traditionally easy to pickup and program languages lacked power and growth. Look at that LOGO turtle go! I think we can all agree that this also does not describe Perl.

I picked up Perl, and immediately felt welcomed into it. It made it fun to program. Yet several years into it I can *still* learn a new thing a day. Not just 'a new thing', but 'a new thing A DAY'. Think about the limitless possibilities of Perl.

To put it another way, the leading edge and the training edge of 'the Perl experience' enclose such a large area. It's a joy to get into (the close leading edge), yet you do not 'outgrow' it. Perl is easy to learn not because it's underpowered or dumbed down, but because it's smart enough to do 'the right thing' as well as having a forgiving syntax, more then one way to do something, copious error checking and messages, etc. And the entire idea of modules (ok, CPAN does work it's way back in) means that when you take Perl far, even there are building blocks that keep coding a joy of creation instead of a chore of worrying the details to death.

That's the number one reason I prefer Perl.

=Blue
...you might be eaten by a grue...