Perl gets trashed a lot for how unreadable it is, but examples that aren't intentionally written to be as obfuscated as possible are often just examples of how

Perl gets trashed a lot for how unreadable it is, but examples that aren't intentionally written to be as obfuscated as possible are often just examples of how ugly regular expressions are. For people who understand regular expressions and understand how they are used in perl it's not as hard to read/follow as it looks. Perl certainly has a few features that don't help its reputation (like the extremely useful '$_') but it gets more hate than it deserves. It's still my language of choice when it comes to regex heavy projects. That said, if your goal was to write obfuscated code, perl wouldn't be a bad choice!