> 1. Sigils: Why is this bad? You know how people in languages without grammatical gender (like English) complain about grammatical gender when they encounter

> 1. Sigils: Why is this bad? You know how people in languages without grammatical gender (like English) complain about grammatical gender when they encounter them in other languages (like most other Indo-European languages)? It's the same basic thing: if you come from an environment where it's not present, it seems unnecessarily fussy to have to specify it all the time. > 2. Regular expressions: How else would you represent regular expressions? Actually, my big problem with Perl is its use of regexes. It's not that the regex syntax is bad (and Perl actually tends to let you make regexes more readable than other languages). It's that Perl code tends to be written so that basic string operations are all replaced with regexes, so figuring out what you're actually doing becomes somewhat annoying. "if !key.startswith("TARGET")" is much easier to read than "if $key !~ m/^TARGET/" > For that even today Python is bad at anything which has non trivial data work. Honestly, I've found that Python does a better job than any other language I've used at doing the basic drudgery of getting data from one format to another--I've even used it to get JSON-like dumping of binary formats!