[jamesbritt]

I went from Perl to Ruby about 10 years ago, and I can't say there's anything I miss. Certainly, at the start, running Web apps was easier in Perl because most servers had mod_perl out of the box. But for day-to-day tasks I found I much preferred Ruby. The reasons for this, though, are as likely personal aesthetics as anything else.

Nowadays Phusion Passenger makes Rack-based Web apps snake-simple, and using JRuby gives me all of the Java libs out there (including Swing for insanely-easy cross-platform GUI apps when teamed with Monkeybars), as well the option to deploy Web apps as war files to Java app servers.

At this point the interest in Perl would have to be due to some intrinsic language feature that might help broaden your ideas about programming in general (the way that, say, Haskell or Io might).