I saw this post by Eskild Hustvedts linked to on PerlMonks, and it’s as though someone had been reading my mind and diary:

Perl was my first proper programming language. As a 17 year old I picked up the llama book, Learning Perl, the third edition, covering Perl 5.6. The choice of language was largely made because it was used extensively in Mandrake Linux, that I was contributing to at the time.

This! I yo-yo’d between Mandrake and Red Hat, but I was even about his age and read the exact version of the Learning Perl book. It was the most fun I’d ever had writing code before.

As time went on and I was no longer programming for a living, I drifted towards other languages. I never really left Perl, since I was maintaining several programs written in it, and it was still my go-to for one-off scripts,

Also, literally, this! I don’t program for living anymore either, and I never stopped using Perl for small scripts. Though unlike his experience with JS, shell scripts mostly subsumed what I had been using Perl for. My rule of thumb was that if a script needed functions, I’d delegate to Perl.

This is the most fun I’ve had writing code for years. It’s just so nice to write.

It’s not the same language I learned from the llama many years ago. It has improved immensely, while never losing any of the things that made it great in the first place. If you’ve overlooked Perl, I recommend giving it another look

This I think gets to a key point. Eskild and I never stopped writing Perl, but in my experience I never stopped writing idiomatic Perl 5.6. Which still works even with current versions of Perl, which is pretty wild.

Perl has evolved and grown a lot since then (yay, method signatures!), but so much of what I used and loved is still there. I agree with Eskild; give yourself the opportunity to take a look again. Or check out any other classic language you used to write.