It's definitely more powerful and has less foot guns than bash, the problem is the stigma is worse than bash. You will face more scrutiny and possible derision from your colleagues for using Perl than bash. It's not just questioning your taste or style either, it's because of the fear they might have to one day maintain or try to understand your Perl.

I speak from some experience. Because I'm a 90s UNIX nerd, I quickly hacked up a a bunch of stuff in Perl maybe 6 years ago to solve some text processing tasks for a compliance audit. It worked well and got the job done within the time constraints. I actually got some kudos for getting our team out of a jam and doing grungy work people weren't keen to do. My teammates though, they lost no opportunity to dunk on the fact that it was done in Perl, and questioned my decision at every opportunity. I ended up rewriting the whole thing in Python for our next audit.

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JSR_FDED 7 hours ago | parent [-]

The opinion of coworkers is not a factor - but I have a friend who says that he has to relearn Perl every time he needs to use it. Do you have to use it every day to maintain fluency?

	▲	spudlyo 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It doesn't take too long to get back into the swing of things. After a while, if you learn enough programming languages, they all tend to meld together in your brain, and the cost of switching isn't too disruptive. You know what you want to do, it's just the details that temporarily get in your way.
	▲	hn_acc1 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yeah, as someone who occasionally had to hack on perl scripts - and I mean, maybe add/modify a hundred lines to add a new feature, then nothing for a few months, I found this too. Stop doing it for a while, and I had to relearn it all over. I'd probably have an easier time getting back into REXX that I last used in 1992 or something..