because I didn't come from a UNIX background. ("ls" and "chmod" were about the only UNIX commands I knew.) Everytime the book said "Perl function x works just like y in UNIX" I had to go spend (sometimes hours) trying to figure out what the heck that meant. It was very frustrating.

This statement reflects something I've said many many times before and I'll say yet again, Perl needs to be more OS agnostic. The fact that it's severly Unix biased is not A Good Thing(TM). Perl has so much to offer for developers of all platforms (and speaking from my perspective, most certainly Win32 and Unix), but there's noone that can convince me that it really "feels" like a Win32 language in any way as much as it does a Unix one. (I happen to use both OS's).

Perl is NOT designed for creating one-size-fits-all solutions, which means that there are very few pre-packaged, ready-to-go out-of-the-box, for-pay Perl programs. That's not a bug, it's a feature. Perl isn't designed to solve everyone's problems, it's designed to solve your problem.

Interesting way of putting it. Though I can't say I totally agree that it's not for "ready-to-go out-of-the-box" stuff. Visual Basic + DLL Hell isn't a much more exciting prospect to look forward to. I speak from experience at my last job, where we simply could not get our internal report generation program to run on any but one of the computers in the office (because of missing DLL's and other odd errors).

And just one more thing I can't help but comment on...use Python for large projects? eek...I started testing Python out by doing (or starting to do) a new client of mine's site with Python. I got severely turned off by the syntactic whitespace when a.) I indented one line with a tab and the next line with spaces and the compiler complained (a completely invisible error), and b.) I downloaded what I thought would be a reusable form mailer Python program, only to find out when I got it that the indentation was all messed up, rendering the code useless. I can't imagine how much my paranoia would increase if I was dealing with a 20,000 - 50,000 line Python code base.

Needless to say, I'm doing the site in Perl now. :)