If you ask for the languages of the moment, you will hear people talk about Ruby, C#, JavaScript, Erlang, Python or even Haskell. You probably won't hear Perl mentioned. Perl's current standing is like that of JavaScript a few years ago. JavaScript was perceived as a ghastly, hacky language, which was so awful that one had to hold ones nose to program in it. With the rise of excellent JavaScript frameworks like Jquery, YUI, MooTools and Dojo and the publication of Douglas Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts, people are realising that it's actually a really nice language with occasional quirks.