> Perl is horrible, ugly, unclean, unmaintainable in the general case, inelegant Depends on the coder. To me "maintainable code" == "readable code" == "self-do

> Perl is horrible, ugly, unclean, unmaintainable in the general case, inelegant Depends on the coder. To me "maintainable code" == "readable code" == "self-documenting code" and that's very easy to achieve with Perl. Unfortunately most of the Perl found on the web and in Perl books set bad examples for those learning Perl such as abusing the default variable $_, abusing regex for simple string operations, using procedural code where an OO model would be more clear, abbreviating names of variables and functions to just a single letter, using Perl's obscure built-in parameters without explanation, and using all of the above to create obfuscated one-liners to perform complex tasks. All of these bad habits have spread like a virus into the habits of Perl coders and it takes time to break these habits. Unfortunately some shops think the answer to sloppy Perl code is to replace all Perl code with <my pet language> as if that will make everything better but instead the new code is just as unreadable because it encourages different kinds of bad habits. And I'm sorry to all you LISP fans here, and this may even get me banned from this web site, but hooray for you because you can emulate Google PageRank with 5 bytes of LISP code that throws the LISP interpreter into some obscure self-awareness mode that transcends human understanding but is that readable? Is that maintainable? Is that self-documenting? I don't think so. Yeah, that's cool you can do that but I'll stick with Perl, thanks.