I like to program Perl. Sure, I'm not saying it's a perfect language, it's got it's flaws and quirks, for one, the roll your own object model included in Perl5 leaves something to be desired. It's also possible to write quite unstructured and unreadable perl, but then I think sites like The Daily WTF has shown us that you can write cryptic and hard to maintain code in pretty much any language. To me, modern perl code is a pleasure to maintain. It's also a fact that Perl has one of the finest suites of tools for writing tests in existance. We've got everything from documentation coverage tests to www-mechanize tests. Just look for yourself.

Also, I agree that you can write code that runs faster in C and C++, given that they are closer to the machine. It takes longer to write it tho. I don't find it's a given that more highlevel strongly typed languages like Java and C# runs faster than Perl, but it is still a given that it takes longer to write. Perl also makes it really easy for me to integrate those lightning fast C/C++ libraries when I require speed. For instance, I really enjoy using Search::Xapian, the Perl bindings to the Xapian search engine. I remember doing that kind of stuff with JNI back when I was coding Java, and it was an absolute nightmare.

Perl 5 has existed for about 10 years now, and it seems people have decided that means it's obsolete, fit for the museum, no longer suited for production use. They conveniently forget that other languages like C and C++ has been going strong for much longer, and that Java is just as old. It's not like there hasn't been any development of Perl5 in the last 10 years either, we're up to 5.8.8 now, and it's come a long way since 5.0. CPAN is getting more module submissions than ever before, and we've got several strong MVC frameworks, including Catalyst and Jifty, competing in the same market as Rails. There are also several top sites on the net like Slashdot and Amazon built on Perl.

That's why it pisses me of to no limit that Joel figures he can write off Perl as one of "an infinity of platforms where you're pretty much guaranteed to fail spectacularly when it's too late to change anything". Want to talk about the gigantic ecosystems you need to develop web applications? Show me any other language that has anything even nearly as gigantic as CPAN's 10474 modules for doing anything from Reading your iTunes library to Talking to your enterprise SAP system.