I've seen languages come and go. At college it was Pascal, which led to a job using Fortran, which led to another job using C, and then my career took a left turn to system/network admin. The point is, Python has been preferred teaching language at universities for, what, a decade now. A vote for Python is NOT a vote AGAINST perl. The vast majority of coders, developers, architects HAVE NEVER USED PERL. Projects will be based around Python because it's best sell in the corporate environment. So of course perl's low on the list. That being said, yeah, my last coding project was in Perl, where I replaced a $100k Infosystem Java project with a week of part time perl coding. Anything with strings, oh, databases, web sites, application integration, are ALL DONE BETTER ON PERL. Sorry, I know the flames heading my way, because people don't want to be proven wrong. Anything to keep the reality distortion Python base happy. Hell, I'd bring back Fortran if I could. Still better than Python. I'll give a nod to C. It's excellent for code where speed is needed. Ever worked in a development environment where one coder optimized apps by dumping the executable to assembly and look for the unused loops? No. You just worked with Python and all the warm fuzzies. I say if you are in a Python asylum, see where you can replace a page of type matching and string to integer spaghetti with a couple of lines for perl hashes. Drive them crazy.