"Perl, I'm leaving you".

It isn't as dramatic for me as the comic portrays. I just needed a programming language again that felt like a scripting language... where you can just take some existing functionality from readily available 'libraries', and hack together a little program to do a well-defined one-time task.

And I finally had the time.

Ten years ago programming in Perl was my day job(*), so obviously I was using Perl for stuff like that. But already in 1999 I heard of Python and figured I'd want to try it out.
It never got to that, since...
* learning anything new is time consuming for me, because I just have that kind of character. I just end up reading all of the documentation properly, before I have the feeling I know enough to start. So I get lost in the tuturial (and all kinds of links leading from it) for days.
* I don't have that much free time (at least not time that I haven't reserved for lots of other things)
* I don't really do much 'quick programming' anymore in my free time lately. So the reason was never pressing enough.

From 1999 until 2003, I've always fallen back on Perl because I knew it so well. Then after that there was this huge gap of not doing much, and then there was this gap of "if I do something, I first want to learn Python. I just want to. I just know it will be better than going back to Perl." - and starting to read documentation - and abandoning it because time was up. End result: zero 'quick/little programming stuff' getting done

So now... I've finally gone ahead and read the full Python tutorial again, to code one small thing I didn't want to do by hand, because it was going to have to bed done multiple times. (Namely: fixing the binding between translated nodes on my upgraded D6 site in the database, after I'd done the upgrade. Because for my sites these bindings were lost, and functionality for 'Choosing an existing node as a translation of another node' was not available in the 18n module (!?!!).)

I've learnt some new stuff while reading the documentation, too. (The concept of dedicated iterators. for instance; I've never programmed in a language before, that has these.)

The skies have not opened up for me yet like in the comic. I just did this one thing and then went on with all my other work. And for me, it's like learning how to drive. Learning is only one thing... I need to do it a lot more before I feel comfortable and stop thinking about every step I do. But hey, at least I've taken the biggest hurdle

(*) And stop it with the "Perl is not a programming language" comments. They've gotten so old and are usually giveaways of 'wannabe knowitalls'.
I know you can write really bad Perl. I know that is actually being done most of the time. But you can also decide to use good programming techniques while writing Perl. We did it at the RIPE NCC. We produced Perl programs. It can be done. Using Perl does not automatically switch your brain off. I promise.