My piece of advice is to maintain a thick skin, many out there who failed to love Perl ended up poking things in it, be it their complaints about the syntax, the approach, the readability...etc, but they don't seem to appreciate that Perl is a language for those who are linguistically capable and that it has so many virtues, we boast of our cohesiveness and heterogeneousness, we all come from different walks of life where we apply Perl and this in itself is a great source of development for a programmer for they can see how this language can be stretched to solve problems in many areas (finance, biology, mathematics, networking, system administration...etc)...