"Practical" modern Perl for Ruby/Python people

Interesting, Perl's come a long way since I picked it up in 2001 (and dropped it for Ruby in 2007), but it just doesn't feel organic to the language.<p>Sadly, things like Perl 5i <a href="http://github.com/schwern/perl5i" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/schwern/perl5i</a>, while awesome in the service they provide the Perl community, just make me wonder why one would even use a language that makes you go there.<p>Stumbling across a Perl script these days feels like finding an Awk script; it's nostalgic and interesting, but I generally just want to stay away.

Yeah, perl's bad reputation is undeserved in some ways. My definition of a bad language is one that _forces_ you to code in "bad" ways. There's very little that perl forces you to do. Insofar as it's bad, it's bad in a very different way to, say, VBScript.