Same here. Learned CGI.pm and read the Perl & MySQL book by Dubois as well as most of the O'Reilly Perl collection. Then I was off to the races. Built an app with CGI::Application which ran a client's business for over a decade without many hiccups. Programming Perl by Larry Wall and Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey Friedl are still some of my favourite tech books.

Yes, indeed. The last Perl thing I worked was a masonhq project in 2008.

Mason was supposed to be Perl's answer to PHP. Trouble is you could only get it to anywhere the speed of PHP by hosting it on mod_perl which wasn't an option with shared hosting deals. Same with Perl's heavyweight framework Catalyst - a veritable beast without mod_perl. All died a death in the fire of Perl's attempts to compete with PHP, Python and Ruby. Moose, Mouse, Moo, Mo - none of it really stuck because Perl's forte was procedural. Having said that The Damian did a great job promoting OO Perl. That guy's a true genius. The thing I miss most about my time with Perl in the 2000s is the cast of characters. No language I've come across since has anywhere near the range of acolytes which made the Perl community legendary.

Perl was my first language too! Believe it or not, there's a ton of b*ch work that still needs to be done by interns at legacy tech that involves the language (looking at you Veritas, although this was a long time ago so who knows).

I'm grateful Rust now exists and is able to match, and even beat, Perl in regex text surgery.

Yeah I've been thinking about learning Rust, but I've been 100% javascript the last 10 years.

I sometimes miss the old days of writing CGI scripts. But then Java was all the rage and the tooling was so much better, and then JS and Python and a ton of new languages and frameworks and Perl seemed like it just ossified and never caught up.

The most common modern web frameworks for Perl are Mojolicious[1] and Dancer[2]

[1] https://metacpan.org/dist/Mojolicious/view/lib/Mojolicious/G...

[2] https://metacpan.org/pod/Dancer2