Why Perl?
> I can be confident that a Perl script I write today will run unaltered 10 years from now, modulo external collaborators.<p>Yeah, because the ecosystem is dead. The flipside is that the bulk of Perl modules available are stale and don't receive any security updates or bug fixes. If I had a pound for every time I've seen a 10+ year old bug with no comments in the CPAN issue tracker...<p>> Perl has a small set of core syntax and is very extensible and flexible in adopting new paradigms.<p>Depends what you call "core syntax". The syntax available to you with a stock Perl install is certainly not small compared to other languages.<p>> With a great amount of discipline, Perl scripts can be successfully scaled up into large, complex systems.<p>If you're disciplined, you can write complex systems pretty much as well as you could in Python or any other dynamically-typed language.<p>However, it requires a lot of discipline and experience, and with other languages you at least have good formatters and LSPs to help with that. Perl sorely lacks this kind of infrastructure.<p>I also think the lack of static types makes writing complex systems massively harder, but that's not a criticism of Perl in particular.