>>I think this weired syntax is a very bad choice. Ah, the luxury the modern breed of programmers enjoy today makes me feel jealous. In these days of Splunk an

>>I think this weired syntax is a very bad choice. Ah, the luxury the modern breed of programmers enjoy today makes me feel jealous. In these days of Splunk and Document databases(returning jsons and xmls) its hard to understand why so many things in the past were the way they were. Apart from DBMS interaction(Perl had DBI/x modules for that), pretty much every thing in the decade of 80's even upto late 2000's(tons of legacy systems) was so non standardized that people were literally parsing through log files and non standard data formats to store/exchange a lot of things, this was when the internet was growing crazy year over year, systems needed to be built and put in place. This means you really need to have first class facilities to manipulate text. You needed regexes baked neatly into the language. You needed qw, you needed ``, you needed while<FILEHANDLE>, you needed binary file handling features, you needed string manipulation facilities that could help you drill through any text file you could imagine, you needed powerful functional programming features, you needed OO etc etc. And you needed to get this done under tough deadlines on slow machines. Remember Java being cross platform compliant was one of the biggest selling point of the day. Perl had this before Java. I personally worked on building a store using rcs and perl, that could store versioned config files, almost like a document data base. The parsing facilities required for the application we did demanded nothing short of a tool like Perl. Python, and also Java growing rapidly once the data exchange formats were reduced to mark up languages and JSON. Suddenly you could with a library what most Perl programmers were doing using their language powers. Also look at the Human Genome Project and Perl usage there.