Perl almost encourages obfuscation. Some folks took pride in writing hard to read Perl code - and the language gave them all the rope they could hang themselves

Perl almost encourages obfuscation. Some folks took pride in writing hard to read Perl code - and the language gave them all the rope they could hang themselves with. For that reason I always disliked Perl, quite strongly, and from the beginning (I've first seen it in the '90s). Bad, naive language design, that's all. The prevalence of Python nowadays is a sign of maturity.