Tim O’Reilly responds to a concerned programmer that is pondering the relevance of Perl in the face of competition from PHP, Python, and the statics .NET/J2EE.

Tim concurs that other languages have been gaining rapidly while Perl hasn’t. And as the original question didn’t mention Ruby nor Rails, he takes the opportunity to present the O’Reilly perspective on the duo:

The other scripting language (in addition to Perl, Python, and PHP) that we’re paying a lot more attention to these days is Ruby. The Ruby On Rails framework has taking the world by storm, and has gone one up on PHP in terms of making database backed application programming a piece of cake.

Welcome to the era of quick’n’clean.