I like Perl a lot, it is the language I have used the most in my professional career. That being said, on my last two workplaces it happened to be in the list of forbidden technologies, not even being able to write a simple one liner and instead having to resort to using awk, sed and the like. It sadly suffers from underserved hate from developers who never used it.

s/underserved/undeserved/ eh? (I don't mean to criticize, I've just been noticing a lot of malapropisms recently. I suspect some auto-correct is goofing up.)

Anyway...

Somewhat deserved, surely?

Perl is like the Continuum transfunctioner, "Its power is exceeded only by its mystery." ;-)

Can you expand on the "forbidden technologies"? What else was on the list, what were the penalties for entering forbidden territory? Could you use it on your own machine for research?

As someone who works at a company where Perl is used as duct tape, we've slowly but surely been ripping it out piece by piece and replacing it with Python (and by "we", I mean "me").

Much of our "duct tape" is unmaintainable code with undocumented aracne regexes everywhere, single-letter variables, and 1990s-era flow control. Nothing you'd find in Modern Perl is in our duct tape. Ultimately, the fastest turnaround on "we need feature X added to Perl script Y" is going to be "rewrite Y in Python, add feature X" because actually extending the Perl code has proven to be a nightmare.

(and as a side note, most of these Perl scripts ran out of cron on various boxen scattered across our network, and as I've been rewriting them I've also been removing them from cron and putting them in our centralized setup that uses Jenkins to run scripts, pulled out of git, inside Docker images on a schedule)

It sounds like bad code is your problem, and not Perl. Am I missing something?

I'm a Perl fan, and I'll be the first to admit that something about Perl makes it easier to write idiosyncratic code that the writer understands, but the maintainer may not. The almost fanatical adherence to an official idiom one sees in Python is almost wholly lacking in Perl.