The Funhouse Mirror of Perl Criticism

phoenixtrap.com

12 points·mjgardner··3 comments

Those used to more bondage-and-discipline languages (hi, Java!) might feel revulsion at the lengths to which this has sometimes been taken, but per the quote above this is less an indictment of the language and more of its less methodical programmers.

"Hi, Python!" the author meant.

Let's just accept that Perl has significant readability issues -- far beyond ASCII rot and the pitfalls of TMTOWTDI -- please, which is why it is such a visceral turnoff to many programmers.

Including, yes, a great many hightly "methodical" ones.

Is there anything you can do in Perl, that you can't do a cleaner way in another language?

There is some stuff, for sure - regexes were somewhat more advanced than in competing languages, last I checked. But most of the other benefits it does provide either (1) mostly YAGNI (2) risky to use (3) impediments to readability.

As well as being just plain complexity bloat, and impediments to the maintainability of the language as a whole. Lo and behold, the interpreter is VERY complex, and the number of people who understand its intentionally arcane inner workings, is, correspondingly, quite tiny -- which has been a significant drag coefficient acting against its developmental velocity forward evolution.

Which has a lot to do with why (despite its being truly great in the 90s and aughts) we just don't hear very much about it anymore.

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