Learn Perl! Perl has: --------------------- * Great Community * CPAN - With Perl you have one command to access literally tens of thousands of open sourced modules * Awesome Tools: - Moose for best way to model objects - Plack for web application building - perlbrew ... And Perl is open source software among many other things.

I am programming Perl for a long time. I would say, to me, it is more or less a kind of identity.

It is free software. It has a great community. Perl can be used, for batch processing, web development (as you mentioned), data analysis and text manipulation. It is multi-platform. It can interact withe C, C++. Java, Python, etc.

Last but not least it has the CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network), a huge repository of free code. If you missing a functionality, surely you will find some options there.

Perl is healthy and growing and you can easily be part of its community.

Modern Perl, have a look at: http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/index.html