Let's stipulate that Larry Wall is a religious fanatic (though I think that's only true if you use the word "fanatic" in a highly nonstandard way). So what? Wha

Let's stipulate that Larry Wall is a religious fanatic (though I think that's only true if you use the word "fanatic" in a highly nonstandard way). So what? What actual impact has that had on the design of Perl? What features of Perl's design are worse as a result of Larry Wall's religious beliefs or practices? I don't see any sign that any are. (You mention exactly one thing about Perl's design, namely the "bless" keyword. That's a bit quirky, but it's not a terrible name for what it does and nothing obviously better occurs to me.) > Going on a missionary expedition [...] sounds to me more like [...] than a sound motivation for programming language design. In what way were Larry Wall's missionary ambitions a "motivation for programming language design" at all? I don't see any sign that they were. (I do remember, from many years ago, something in Perl's licence or readme file along the lines of "I make Perl because I think it pleases the Author of my story. If you have a problem with that, your notion of Authorship needs some revision :-)", but I think that means not "I wrote Perl to help me convert the heathen" but "Everything I do is for the greater glory of God". So far as I can see, that doesn't imply any particular language-design choices.) [EDITED to add: I looked it up. The above doesn't misquote too badly, but one place where it diverges from the original is that he actually wrote "nice things like this", not "Perl" specifically. I think this makes it even clearer that the Perl language design as such is not what LW is saying was religiously motivated. You can find the actual text at https://github.com/Perl/perl5 https://github.com/Perl/perl5 if you care.] I listened to as much as I could bear to of that language design conversation. (The audio is incredibly bad for almost all of it, unfortunately.) I didn't notice Larry Wall's contributions being notably less insightful, more dogmatic, more ignorant, or whatever it is you're gesturing towards. The one example you give is that Larry Wall doesn't like IDEs and James Gosling does, which doesn't seem like good evidence of anything. So, please, if you're going to make this sort of claim, make it explicit enough to engage with properly. What about Perl is the way it is becaues of Larry's "religious fanaticism"? (As it happens I'm an atheist and don't like Perl very much. There's plenty I dislike a lot about both Christianity and Perl. It's the alleged connection you're trying to draw between them that I don't see at all.)