I maintain others Perl code and am no expert. Its our most use web tool and has been running for 10 years. I think Perl is different enough to confuse people

I maintain others Perl code and am no expert. Its our most use web tool and has been running for 10 years. I think Perl is different enough to confuse people who look at it (@,%,$) and it can make it hard to follow. I still have a little problems switching to it from other languages sometimes (do x unless y seems backward to me). I've also been told I write perl like a c programmer. Perl does have some beautiful parts though.. CPAN is great, but its hard sometimes when I just want to install something easy. It was the first great shared library and it shows its age a bit. Last time I ran it, it was compiling C code for some strange reason. We have trouble setting up shared perl environments, something we don'e have with python. Biology has a lot of Perl code still, but it seems to moving to python. Terrible code exists in many languages.