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I understand Perl is still very popular, but I have always hate Perl with a passion. I felt it was just a bunch of arbitrary rules that you had to memorize vs a

I understand Perl is still very popular, but I have always hate Perl with a passion. I felt it was just a bunch of arbitrary rules that you had to memorize vs a more naturally intuitive language. For example, if I remember correctly, Perl supported both "&&" and "and", with 2 different precedences. And the line of code that broke me was something similar to $a = $src[$src] At first I thought it was a bug, but then I realized that there must be two different variables called src, one was a scalar and the other was an array (I think that's what it's called it's been 15 years since I've used it). Anyway at that point, I decided I hated Perl and would never use it again.

biztos 7y ago
Don't most programming languages have a few idioms that really annoy newcomers? I've been using Perl since the 1990's so when I see something like your example, my first thought is "oh no, somebody who doesn't know Perl wrote this Perl code!"[0] I recently learned Python and while I think I'm pretty OK at it, I still have WTF moments from time to time. Like: > from datetime import datetime # WTF? and yet standard! I'm often tempted to rant about semantics and documentation culture in Python but then I remember hey, lots of people have similar criticisms of languages I know better, so maybe I should just give it some time. I'm not saying you should have liked Perl, but in the programming landscape of 15 years ago you were passing up one of the most important things powering the Web. [0]: never name two variables of different types the same thing; never use $a as a normal variable because it's sometimes Special.