I don't generally see sales pitches of this level on sites actually selling something.

>And anybody who denies this is simply trolling.

Logical fallacy: Appeal to emotion. "My argument cannot be argued with because " is always a logical fallacy. "amazingly useful" is subjective, so of course it can be argued and doing so is not trolling but perfectly reasonable. Don't make claims you don't wish to back up.

>Its useful for almost anything to everything. From scripting, to application development, to prototyping to building reliable applications in any domain.

Logical fallacy: Misleading vividness. While what you say may be true, you've just described a programming language. There is nothing in this sales pitch that is perl specific.

>Perl adapts to nearly every programming paradigm out there.

This one is a better claim. The proper term is "multi-paradigm". Most (all?) Lisp dialects are also multi-paradigm, among various other languages.

>Its amazingly flexible, easy to learn and extensible.

"Amazingly flexible" is subjective. For example, a Smalltalk or Lisp programmer isn't going to be impressed (nor would programmers of Self, IO, etc., etc.).

Easy to learn can be tested to some degree and I believe you'll find the data against you. It would be an interesting to catalog the kinds of questions that get asked about the various languages. In my anecdotal experience, people start having problems with perl right at the beginning with e.g. how variables work.

Extensible is again "Misleading vividness". I can think of more languages that have a similar level of extensibility than those that do not.

>You also get to benefit from the community experience and knowledge accumulated over years.

Misleading vividness.

>You get the power of CPAN.

Overemphasized. Use a JVM-language (e.g. Clojure), for example, and you'll get the power of any open source JVM-language code ever written.

>There are also amazing resources to learn Perl.

Again, if you look at popular languages today there are few that wouldn't tick this box.

>Its a tool that you will never stop being in love with.

This claim is just ridiculous and wrong. I used perl professionally for over half a decade. At first I didn't care that much one way or the other. I was a C++ programmer and this was easier in some cases (but less flexible in other ways that I was used to exploiting). But as the years went on I grew to hate the language more and more until I just couldn't bare it anymore. I hated the backwards defaults (e.g. dynamic variables are fantastic. But as a default? wtf?), how ugly sigils look in code, the embarrassing "OO" syntax at the time and, one of the worst, how the community was constantly trying to prove they were relevant (obviously still the case). You could never mention Perl online or around Perl people without having to listen to the same tired tautologies about how incredibly powerful it is (wtf have you been using to think this?), etc.

So no, it's not a tool you'll never stop being in love with. This is the "Mind projection fallacy". You feel that way, but the vast sea of perl developers who abandoned ship for Python, Ruby, PHP, etc. obviously don't.

>Those of us who have used Perl and pushed its boundaries to get amazing stuff done over years, even now can't write down words to describe its greatness.

More "Misleading vividness". We all have stories like this in our favorite languages, but practitioners of other languages don't seem to feel compelled to post them anywhere and everywhere.

>We can only tell you how great it is, but when you see it yourself you will know it.

Appeal to mysticism. Sure we will.

>But the position of any new Perl programmer is enviable to say at the least.

Hah! If you had just said "Programmer" I would have found this an inspiring sentiment, but Perl programmer? No. I don't envy several months of "wtf" (e.g. the first time you figure out that your code accidentally applies ++ to a var that has a string in it and instead of crashing so you detect this immediately it does something with it).