can't forget a single paragraph of the Camel or PBP no matter how hard I try
This is probably the problem. PBP and the Camel are horribly outdated, and most of PBP's advice was crap when it first came out. You are going to hate Perl if you follow its advice to the letter. PBP Perl is the worst of Java mixed with the worst of Perl. Yeah, that's going to suck.
Anyway, as someone who probably writes and maintains as much Perl code as you (just see my 100+ Perl projects on Github), I've found Perl to be significantly simpler to write and maintain than other languages, and I would recommend it over nearly every other language that I have used. (Cases that I wouldn't recommend it for? For apps that need to be faster, I would use CL; and for apps that need to be massively concurrent I would recommend Haskell. But I certainly see no use for Ruby, Python, C#, Java, or Erlang, Perl's "usual" competitors.)
jrockway, since you're a long time member of HN and I enjoy your comments on other topics i'm more than happy to agree-to-disagree with you about perl. if you "see no use" for any of [ Ruby, Python, C#, Java, Erlang ] then it is unlikely that we have any common ground on which to meet about this, but i'd rather avoid a confrontation on the subject because i'd like for us to get along. :)
This is probably the problem. PBP and the Camel are horribly outdated, and most of PBP's advice was crap when it first came out. You are going to hate Perl if you follow its advice to the letter. PBP Perl is the worst of Java mixed with the worst of Perl. Yeah, that's going to suck.
Anyway, as someone who probably writes and maintains as much Perl code as you (just see my 100+ Perl projects on Github), I've found Perl to be significantly simpler to write and maintain than other languages, and I would recommend it over nearly every other language that I have used. (Cases that I wouldn't recommend it for? For apps that need to be faster, I would use CL; and for apps that need to be massively concurrent I would recommend Haskell. But I certainly see no use for Ruby, Python, C#, Java, or Erlang, Perl's "usual" competitors.)