Perl is awesome for writing big programs in. One of the things that people find frustrating about Perl is its expressiveness -- that is, there are many differe

Perl is awesome for writing big programs in. One of the things that people find frustrating about Perl is its expressiveness -- that is, there are many different ways of doing the same thing. The result is sometimes that you get 100 different people doing things 100 different ways. This is not so much a problem with the language as it is with programmers not learning to agree on a set of idioms that they will use for a project. They are not reading each others code and having discussions about what they want to see. Languages that impose "the one true way" cut down on the apparent problems, but you are still going to have massive issues down the road if you build large projects because nobody is paying attention to what the other people are doing. Especially on large projects, it is vital that people read and comment usefully about design issues. In such large projects, removing the choice of idioms available though language design is a bit like deciding not to carry a canary down the mine with you because it keeps getting killed by poisonous gas. The expressiveness of Perl allows you to choose the idioms that will work best for your team/project. It is true that it requires more discipline and communication, but these are the things that are necessary for success on a big project anyway. I haven't written any Perl code for years now, but I have always been fond of it. I find that I can write better code in Perl than in many of the more restrictive languages that I've used.