this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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Programming
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Perl is a write-only language.
You can write clean Perl easily. But it's maybe a bit easier to write illegible code in Perl than in most other languages. It's all up to you though.
I am just regurgitating one of my favorite Perl jokes for a laugh. Though for me the joke contains some truth. Most of the Perl code I've ever seen is pretty impenetrable for non-Perl programmers. I quite literally have returned to my own Perl efforts after just a couple of weeks and had some trouble working out what the code is doing (in ways I do not experience with other languages).
When Python was trying to unseat Perl, that in my view was reason alone to prefer it: I didn't know Python but I could read Python. Though at that point Perl had the benefit of loads of libraries and ubiquity, and Python hadn't got there yet. But it was enough to have me cheering for Python's success at the expense of Perl. I get that Perl has many virtues, but they're nullified by the ugliness and relative inaccessibility of its code in my eyes.
I really hate the magic side-effect variables where you do a pattern match or something and then various obtusely named variables have meaningful values with relation to the last match. To me that's just flat out bad coding, and it's built into the language.
The above was my second-favorite Perl joke. My favorite being:
*BrEng: mole-grips
Those magic match variables from regexen weren't very legible if you weren't a little familiar with them, but they were super useful in lots of cases. Perl could be a godsend to quickly parse lots of text.
I love perl. 20y on I still think in perl.