It sounds like ESR was writing that old-fashioned single-script non-OO stuff, relying on big nested data structures which were indeed often messy and confusing. OO changed all that.
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/search/keeper-1.54.tar.gz
It's slightly better than what you'd have downloaded from any one of hundreds of "FREE PERL SCRIPT" sites in the late '90s, if only because ESR understood Unix better than most.
Well no wonder he expressed frustration. That would be unwieldy in any language. No disrespect to esr (obviously) because that was a million years ago in Internet time.
Do people really disagree that huge, non-OO scripts were the dominant style back in the 1990's? Or that people tried to solve problems with huge data structures instead of classes? And that these practices gave Perl a less than stellar reputation?
Or is it that people don't realize that Perl apps are virtually always written in clean, well-factored OO these days?
Thank you for clarifying. I appreciate it.
No, not doing it wrong -- he was almost certainly doing it in the predominant style of the language in the 1990's, which was procedural / scripty, e.g., hashes of references to arrays of references etc. Pre-OO.
And his remarks are certainly fair for the time period, but isn't it also fair to note that this style of coding is not practiced anymore? I think so but I'm interested in any viewpoint.
However, it's a manner of how you present the comment. As you originally stated it, it pretty much sounded like "He's Doing It Wrong", which didn't add very much to the discussion. In my opinion, a much better way to go about it would have been something closer to "I think it's worth contextualising his comments. It is likely that the style in which was coding was more in line with earlier styles that are not used as often in 2011. While Perl is obviously still Perl, more recent styles do help alleviate some of his concerns."
Now, this clearly still isn't a perfect comment, but it, or something more like it, would serve both to clarify your position and to allow for discussion based on it, if people were up for such discussions.
But, again, I feel the need to reiterate that I was not one of the people who downvoted you, so I'm only guessing as to the most likely reason for the downvotes.
ESR is apparently saying (true at the time) that Perl can be hard to maintain. But by "Perl," I speculate that he was talking about coding in monolithic non-OO scripts which would be a drag in any language.
So his criticism of the language was fair in the 1990's, but only for that style of procedural coding.
I tried to look at his source, but his own links to his Perl stuff are broken:
I don't know python, but "OO changed all that" implies that data-centric approaches are somehow passé, to which I'd reply "yeah, but FP changed all that". Maybe they are in Python though.