Web polls are a lousy way to obtain truth.

Poppycock! Clearly you fail to appreciate The Line of Truth ;^)

I would add to your list the observation that more than any other language I've ever worked with (okay, only C derivatives mostly) Perl allows the programmer to develop idioms of his/her own and to generate a set of (hopefully consistent) norms with which to write and evaluate code. To me, Perl is interesting because accomplishing a task isn't a matter of appeasing a compiler, but figuring what I want to say and how I want to say it. True, this is why people complain about Perl code being "write only", however I'm not inclined to fix the problem of unmaintainable code by forcing everyone to use an intentionally dumbed down language (<cough>Java</cough>).

Perl is a ground breaking language, and I never douted that. Perl totally changed the face of scripting language, changed what scripting language can do. Perl is performance, not only that Perl is fast, but also Perl allows you to develop your application more rapidly.

"Web polls are a lousy way to obtain truth."

I 100% agree with Zaxo. For technical ideas, you don't sanity check or judge them by the number of people support them, but by their qualities.

Comparing with other types of polls, web poll falls in the lousiest area, as the majority of people who visit a certain web site usually already have their mind set solidly established, and their oppionions are usually biased. You come to here ask people whether Perl is better, or Java is better, which one will the majority vote? If you go to a Java site, ask the same question, you will definitely get the opposite answer.