Whether those reasons matter to any particular developer/project or not is not the issue. The fact is that they exist, and that means that people like the parent can stuff their snide digs that Perl users are nothing more than elitists.

Your final comment about businesses avoiding Perl 'scripters' like the plague is telling that your experiences have most likely been limited to the script kiddie types. Perl code written by professionals is developed with, at a minimum, strict, taint checking, and warnings, has the components split up into packages with only public interfaces exported, has POD documentation for all public methods in packages, uses eval blocks to catch exceptions, has global variables confined to a single package with all other variables lexically scoped, uses references extensively, and uses as verbose of a syntax as necessary to make clear the intent of a particular section of code, including but not limited to regular expression patterns. Anything less makes an unmaintainable mess, and I wouldn't want to touch it any more than I want to touch your PHP code.

But the point is, Perl gives you all the tools to not only develop quality code, but also to prevent yourself from making mistakes; it is only a matter of learning how to use them. I'd really like to see someone make a list of PHP features that contribute towards code quality, because obviously I'm missing something somewhere if it really has such features.

Score:2