DSimon comments on What is the best programming language? - Less Wrong
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I remember Perl with fondness, but unfortunately it seems to be a dying language. The foretold Perl 6 (literally foretold, there were "exegeneses" and "apocalypses" and everything) has been at a standstill for many years, and the once-amazing CPAN has now been utterly demolished by the likes of GitHub and RubyGems. There's a lot to be said for languages that have active communities regularly supplying new and updated useful libraries.
If you miss Perl, try Ruby; it actually was meant at the beginning to be a fairly Perl-like language, and it has many (IMO somewhat underused) features that assist with quick get-crap-done scripts, like the ARGF I/O handle that automatically and conveniently reads through STDIN and/or files specified on the command line.