I go back and forth on that. I like both Perl 5 and Common Lisp, and am investigating Perl 6 now. Perl has more operator magic, but it also makes many things a

I go back and forth on that. I like both Perl 5 and Common Lisp, and am investigating Perl 6 now. Perl has more operator magic, but it also makes many things a lot less tedious to write, and for common tasks I quickly figure out a nice way of doing things. Common Lisp is more uniform but somewhat clunky and verbose for a lot of common things. And when it's not, it's because you created a nice little DSL using macros (maybe even read macros), which then starts looking more like Perl-style magic (except done with metaprogramming, not built in). As far as heritage, I think Perl's love of magic and concise operators is influenced more by the awk/sed/sh trio that it originally borrowed a lot of its syntax from, rather than by C++.