I miss Perl. I used to do scaled up (for the time) systems management with tools built on Perl4. We’d drop a perl interpreter on the boxes as monitoring and management agents and use another framework to ship data back. Perl4 was ancient then, so we’d backport stuff from CPAN or compile Perl5 for certain things.

It’s definitely a language that was ideal for its user base… admins and early web people mostly. All of my serious coursework in college was C, C++ and Fortran, so just being able to bang out code and get shit done was amazing.