If you want to understand Perl, spend some time on two things: 1) The ecosystem in which it developed and from which it borrows; 2) Larry's understanding of an

If you want to understand Perl, spend some time on two things: 1) The ecosystem in which it developed and from which it borrows; 2) Larry's understanding of and perspective with respect to natural languages and the way they work. Sometimes, Perl trades depth of knowledge for length and explicit minutia of code. It can be confusing if you are not familiar with the dialect, but terribly powerful if you are. And behind the scenes, a lot of effort has been put into making DWIM (Do What I Mean) not only intuitive but often quite good at implementing an optimized solution (e.g. quite performant data representations). P.S. Thank you, chromatic, for your continuing generosity and... I guess I will call it "belief", in the Perl community I encountered 15 years ago. P.P.S. I never was a Perl "expert", and I'm woefully out of touch, these days. But the occasional bit I read leads me to believe that the above still pertains. And I'm curious to learn about version 6, which while a long time coming, really wanted to "take it to the next level". If and as it succeeds, it should be very interesting indeed.