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"People have had to deal with Perl code that they do not understand. It may have been poorly written, or it may have been perfectly written Perl code. If you do not take the time to learn Perl, you would not know the difference."

The problem is that Perl's TIMTOWDI culture and the inconsistent evolution of the core language make learning "enough" Perl harder than learning e.g. "enough" Python.

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Yes, I definitely agree that Perl is harder to learn than Python. My point was that people may not have the time or interest to learn Perl, and so when they see Perl code that they do not understand, they blame it on the language instead of their own lack of knowledge.

Perl has a very rich and powerful and expressive grammar. It takes a good bit of effort to learn all of it. Python has opted for a grammer that is much more simple. That definitely has its benefits. For me personally, I feel constrained when writing Python code due to its lack of expressiveness.

Python's "one obvious way" to do things changes over time too!

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