I've been working with some consultants lately that are huge Perl fanatics, these guys use Perl for everything from system administration to website design. Working with these guys really makes me wonder, isn't Perl dead yet? It's no big secret that I'm a PHP and Python guy so I may have a skewed view on the topic but given the wide array of programming languages (no pun intended) available to firms that are dedicated to open source software why would anybody use Perl?

Given the alternatives like Ruby and Python that tend to be very clean and simple languages I wonder why anybody would use a language as complex and arcane as Perl. Anyhow I don't mean to rip on Perl too much, I was just reading an article and working with these guys... the mind wonders.