"Perl has several XML parsers available and they are presumably good at their jobs (I have never actually used one so I wouldn't know). [...] This is a clear ca

"Perl has several XML parsers available and they are presumably good at their jobs (I have never actually used one so I wouldn't know). [...] This is a clear case of shepherding. Text manipulation in Perl is easy. Importing, calling and using an XML parser is not." The people writing those lame scripts have the same logic the author does. "Must be hard, probably? So I won't even try to learn, I'll just use this regex" A Shepherd's job is to keep the flock safe. If the blind are leading the blind, that is a lack of shepherding. It's not shepherding users to use regex. It's letting the sheep roam free and they're falling off the cliff. Perl's problem has always been that it is too easy to use. 97% of people who write Perl aren't even programmers. It doesn't shepherd you, it lets you write programs even when you don't know what you're doing. We should require drivers licenses in order to program. Programmers think they are capable even when they're not, and their false confidence and laziness leads to shitty code that causes problems. Same for people who try to drive without passing a driver's test. It just causes harm. We should set legal engineering requirements for code just like for other trades. Otherwise some idiot is going to assume XML parsers are super annoying without even looking at them and try to use regex.