why not perl?

I was recently asked this by a recruiter for ticketmaster (a big perl shop):

Quick question if you don't mind. Why not working in perl? You have perl in your background so it's always interesting for me to learn why people move from one language or environment to another. I hope you don't mind "sharing." ;)

My reply:

Perl sucks. Really. It is a horrifically bad language at expressing thoughts cleanly and clearly and from having a maintainable, well-engineered solution. I'm good at it (or was--I dunno about now, but hey, it's Just a Language (tm)), don't get me wrong. I've cut a lot of code in perl professionally and on the side. It just doesn't scale in the long term.

No... I don't mind sharing, as long as you don't mind me blogging it as well. :)

Interestingly, I ported the last of my perl packages to ruby last year. Despite not having worked on it for well over 4 years it was still readable!! It really does depend on the person, but if you're working for a perl shop... I guarantee that there's always that one person (or many) who writes that hideous noxious code.

No thank you.