I would have loved to keep using Perl in a professional setting but even when I first learned it, it was already forever between two major updates. Perl was fun to use. It's just too bad everyone moved on.
This have gotten much better and perl 5 has great momentum these days. There was sort of a changing of the guard as a lot of the old guys moved on to perl6 or other things. However nowadays there is lots of fresh blood moving the project alone real nice like.
I just went to look up Perl 5.10 release notes, and they billed it as "the first major upgrade... in over five years."
http://dev.perl.org/perl5/news/2007/perl-5.10.0.html
I would have loved to keep using Perl in a professional setting but even when I first learned it, it was already forever between two major updates. Perl was fun to use. It's just too bad everyone moved on.