Their Perl examples are full of line noise and footguns. Just the string concat operator can be a source of problems because it was misplaced or forgotten. The

Their Perl examples are full of line noise and footguns. Just the string concat operator can be a source of problems because it was misplaced or forgotten. The qw() operator is also very confusing unless it's explicitly explained. I don't hate on Perl, the first code I ever got paid to write was Perl. It's not a bad language. It's also not a good language. It's a nice glue language you can assume will exist on any random Unix-like machine you sit down at. Its nice in that it can replace a mess of bash/awk/sed scripts. That being said I could not imagine starting a green field project today in Perl unless everyone on the team was a Perl monger. Even then I think there's much stronger options than Perl for most types of projects. Edit: autocowrong typo