"You know what you believe in by observing yourself in a crisis."
— Robert C. Martin, The Clean Coder
Almost three years ago, I wrote a rather presumptuous post about moving away from Perl. I specifically cited Perl's object system as a major reason for dropping it. chromatic called me out on that and for good reason. I also cited maintainability issues with my Perl scripts but those are a result of my own coding and not anything inherent in Perl. (Allowing me to write sloppy code does not mean the same thing as making me write sloppy code.)
While I talked about moving on to Python, I have made almost no progress on this. And when I feel stressed or pressed for time (which is just about always), I always fall back to Perl. It is simply what I know best.
I'm sure I could still correct this. I could immerse myself in Python (or Ruby) and learn either to the point of being able to dream in it. But I haven't done it in the past three years. What likelihood is there that I'll be able to do this in the next three years?
Through observation, and no matter how what rational or irrational reasons I could put forth otherwise, I can only conclude that I believe in Perl.