When I start writing something, I think about how big I expect it to be. If it's expected to be 50 lines or less, then it's bash for general scripts, and awk for text filtering. If it's expected to be more than 50 lines, I go with Perl. That goes regardless of platform (as it's already available on every *nix platform I use, and Strawberry or ActiveState makes Perl easy to add on Windows).

And from what i've seen and anecdotally this still seems to be the common case (Java & Perl are the main languages used by companies in the City of London).

But every now and then you will see <insert some new tool> being compared with a <insert classic tool>. And then told since the <insert some new tool> is a little famous now, its likely to replace the <insert classic tool> and that <quote some irrelevant search engine statistic> actually proves <insert classic tool> is dead and <insert some new tool> is actually going to replace the <insert classic tool> in the future.

Then suddenly expect a stream of tweets, blog posts and forum discussions on how useless <insert classic tool is>.

Please replace <insert classic tool> by "Perl","SQL","Php".

Please replace <insert some new tool> by "Python","Ruby","Tcl","NoSQL","Django"..

Please replace <quote some irrelevant search engine statistic> by Google search stats or Tiobe(Which is the same ,but presented differently metric).

Sometimes a new tool will come along that truly is a huge improvement on previous tools. But, when those previous tools are "classics", it's pretty rare that the "new" tool is truly that much of an improvement.

There's a reason that these things (bash, sed, awk, perl, SQL, Unix/Linux, etc) are still popular and still going. It's because they're time tested, they're well known, and they work.

While it's good to always review your tools & skills... spending lots of time looking at sparkling new things could be better focused on i) getting work done or ii) improving your proficiency with current tools :)