> I always found the Perl "community" to be really off-putting with all the monk and wizard nonsense

The Perl community introduced the world to the first language module repositories via CPAN. No more manually hunting down tarballs off FTP servers

As a language, Perl is extremely expressive, which is amazing for one-off scripts, and awful for code that's meant to be shared and/or reread. For pure text-munging, Perl is still unbeaten, when using Perl-Compatible regexes in other languages, I feel the language getting in my way.

You can write easy-to-read Perl (TIMTOWTDI, and all that), but it doesn't force you like Go (small language size) or Python (by convention and culture, on what counts as 'Pythonic')