Meanwhile, I had a hard time finding (or getting) a Perl programming job (though I resisted coming to the Bay Area for a long time, so that was likely a significant factor). I've had to settle with other languages (mostly Ruby, Elixir, and now Python professionally, though I did sneak a bit of Perl into the Ruby one ;) ).

Where are y'all based? I'm reasonably happy with my current job, but I'm definitely curious about what else is out there (especially if it's not in the Bay Area).

I'm a security guy but like to develop as well. I'd apply for a job in Perl any day, despite not knowing it very well and Python being my main language. But I guess it's easy to say when I just read that you're having trouble hiring, as my expectations of entry requirements are now different. Anyway, it's a shame you have to make such a big change for what shouldn't be a big deal. The language is a tool -- I've even written C# in Visual Studio on Windows 8 for a year in two different companies, which is about as Microsoft-oriented as you can get (I'd rather use something Linux-based). Unless there are major deficiencies and the team is looking to move away already, it shouldn't be a problem to adapt to the team's standards.

You haven't tried training them ?

It's worth getting a few insights into what it does well. As with any language it _can_ do anything, but a few key features that made it stand out for me:

* Perl is set up for really terse one-liners. You can basically emulate or surpass most Unix tools with only a cursory knowledge of the syntax

* Perl syntax is highly geared towards text processing and regular expressions. File handling and regexes are so much quicker and easier to use than Python.

If I were in a situation where I had a bunch of files I needed to process and the task didn't easily fall into something that could be done with a bash command, I'd probably reach for perl over python for a quick and dirty disposable script.

Yes, if you don't want to be forced to write exception handling and doing a dozen different tricks for merely writing and using one single regular expression.

A lot of forced indentation and absence of braces, and absence of sigils makes it harder to read Python scripts. However that's not the only problem with Python. If you are scripting you want the regular `unix_command` command thingy to work fine. More-so you want to read the output of that thing using a syntax like my @command_output = `unix_command`;

You also want heredocs. And you want multiline anonymous functions. I could go on and on.

But Python seems to be more like a tool trying to compete with Java than Perl.

People keep saying Perl6 is great, and I have no reason to think it's any worse than Python (but I don't know it).

One may also want to learn Perl5 for dealing with legacy stuff (either keeping or getting rid of it). There is a lot of it out there.

Many of my issues will be specific to the environment. The thing that made me use the first perl one-liners is because I was used to using 'rename' in the command line and I was able to emulate this with perl more easily (using a regex substitution) than 'mv'.

The second and more pivotal one liner was when I needed to create a primary key to ensure I wasn't getting any dupes later down the pipeline (a requirement that came about as some of the other contractors on the project were messing with my exports and then blaming my files for their conflicting numbers). My first approach was to use the MD5 tool included in GIT bash, but this was prohibitively slow, taking 45 mins to loop through each line of a 4mb file. Not sure if there was a performance penalty on the box I was using, but the perl one liner did the job in a couple of seconds for all the files I had.

After that it mostly became a question of maintainability, with the performance being a boosting factor. I found my perl deduping one liner was faster than either 'sort -u' or 'sort | uniq'. I was able to add new features and account for weird issues more easily. Regex was better than sed, syntax was more flexible than awk, there were more filtering options than grep.

Plus it was good fun. Perl has so many things that just feel so nice and tidy compared to bash.

Having said that, I still use Unix pipelines extensively, they just tend to be for ad hoc queries rather than for my automated reports.

perl has a less divergent set of options across different unix versions - for example, trying to run `sed` in place across MacOS and Linux you'll soon find that the options are different. There are similar issues with BSD vs GNU options in other programs as well.

There's an old quip that "perl is portable sed" - in my experience this is pretty true.

Worth noting that PerlMonks functions similarly to stack overflow (for Perl at least), with the difference that discussion is actually encouraged.