>>24
"our own xml flavor" ... "grep, cat, head, tail, and awk"...
Utter trash. (1) If you are using regular expressions to process XML, you are almost certainly doing something wrong. (2) If your program is faster now that you send string operations to separate processes, your libraries are broken.
Perl as a language is an utter mess, and as an implementation leaves a lot to be desired. Perl's REs have had notably poor performance -- for a language that is so closely associated with REs, that sucks. The good news about Perl is that it does work, and it sits in a convenient niche where shell scripts aren't good enough but C is too painful.
What's the point of learning Perl? Python and Ruby are here now, they're available on your production server, and they are less broken. Perl's day has come and gone.