> Perl is notorious for being "write only". > As in: keeping it clean and well structured is impossible and the impressive flexibility of the language is huge

> Perl is notorious for being "write only". > As in: keeping it clean and well structured is impossible and the impressive flexibility of the language is huge downside on larger projects. Perl gets quite unfairly picked on here, to the point where it's basically a meme. It's not like, just to pick a somewhat popular language, Ruby doesn't provide plenty of ways to write completely unreadable code that can only be understand by running it through irb, if even then. I agree that there is plenty of bad Perl code out there, but there's plenty of bad code in any language that achieves general popularity for a time. Disciplined use can produce perfectly clear and readable code and the module system is perfectly adequate for separation of concerns. The language does give you an absurd amount of rope to hang yourself with though. If I were managing a large Perl project today I'd have an extremely restrictive style guide and would enforce as much of it as possible via pre-commit hooks. > I feel qualified to say such things as I've worked on a billion-line perl codebase before. For a language that permits such densely expressive code, that's appalling. I'm so sorry.