Perl!

So, I've always heard Perl is a bad language, write only etc. I've recently learned it, and now I can write some serious Perl. And you know what? I like it. It's not elegant as Haskell or clean as Python, but if you know it well you can make it elegant and clean.

Actually, I like it more than FIOC. And Python used to be my preferred language! In a sense it's like a reverse Randal (see https://xkcd.com/353/ alt text).

So, some people think Perl is in decline, being replaced by more modern languages. [citation needed].

What do you think of this? Is there any Perl lover here who can tell me it's not gone? I want Perl among us for years to come.

Can we has it?

I'll say this up front: I've not used perl very much, I've probably written about 100-200 lines of it tops. But from what I've seen of it, I'm not very fond of it. It has no formal specification (unless you want to argue that the implementation is the spec, in which case it has an exceptionally poor spec that conflates implementation details with semantics and changes every time someone makes a commit), its syntax is ambiguous and parsing is undecidable. It just seems like this massively complex project in general, and that even to do simple tasks you must keep a lot of it in your head. I'm more than willing to consider the possibility that this is all wrong, and perl is actually a wonderful language that can solve many important problems in a unique way that is (by some metric) better than many other languages, but alas, I have not seen any evidence to this (although I haven't exactly gone looking either).