Again with perl being hard to understand. Bad perl is hard to understand, but good perl is nearly unmatched for idiomatic clarity of expression. It's the only

Again with perl being hard to understand. Bad perl is hard to understand, but good perl is nearly unmatched for idiomatic clarity of expression. It's the only language I know where the style guidelines are less of "line up your braces like this so you don't lose one" and more of "put the essential or surprising thing at the beginning of the line so the code is easy to skim." It's the language that got me thinking in terms of clarity of expression in the first place. It's a power you can use for lazy rather than good, and I'll admit the results of that are ugly. But I find the persistent criticism confusing. Either people are confusing "looks ugly" with "hard to decode" or there's a lot more bad perl code out there than I think that is. Or perhaps perl code is like fish. When it's good, it's good, but when it starts to go bad, it really goes.