Like everything else, Perl has its warts - tacked on object orientation, crude way of handling errors, lack of a decent REPL, way too much expressiveness (I hav

Like everything else, Perl has its warts - tacked on object orientation, crude way of handling errors, lack of a decent REPL, way too much expressiveness (I have seen what happens to a few hundred thousand lines of Perl code written by developers who, instead of writing in a maintainable consistent style, tried to show their cleverness and the language was a willing ally to that) etc. Many words have been spent on those shortcomings so I want to focus on the other side. Many eons ago, I remember me (and my team) being so tired of writing bash wrapper scripts - we just didn't know any better. To my surprise/delight, I discovered that the Solaris boxes we were using came with Perl pre-installed (which in hindsight is totally expected). So I decided to learn about it the proper way and the Llama book was exactly what I needed. People have called Perl code line noise. But when I read the book for the first time, everything make sense to me because my mind likes mnemonics. $ is for ($)calar, @ is @(rray), % has a pair of circles like key/value pair and so on. I didn't find it odd that you'll get the array in list context and count in scalar context - it made complete sense. Till date, Perl is the language which I reach out for short-term tasks which need to be done immediately, because it helps me get the job done at the speed of thought. I picked up some bash scripts as candidates to be re-written in Perl and I will never forget my mind being blown by the sheer lightening speed of Perl scripts; stuff that took many seconds or even minutes in bash were done in a second or less, even with my unrefined code. It was like a new world opened up and indeed, I felt like a wizard.