I love this subthread; I've tried to explain this for years and I've concluded it's simply impossible to convey to someone who never experienced it. It's sad, a

I love this subthread; I've tried to explain this for years and I've concluded it's simply impossible to convey to someone who never experienced it. It's sad, and really frustrating, to just hear the same clueless comments and memes repeated. So I'm glad to see there are still people around who know what it was like to work with a truly expressive language. About 15 years ago I was put on a Java project that ran for a year with half a dozen developers toiling away (along with an outsourced team that management eventually added to write unit tests). I spent half that time fighting with Eclipse and the other half divided between tearing my hair out trying to wade through the AbstractSpringFactoryInterfaceAbstractFrameworkInjectorAbstractionBuilder nightmare, being lectured at by people who learned everything they know about computers from in-flight magazines that this is the way professional software development is done, waiting for the one person who could actually build the application (which he did partly by unzipping the jar files and manually tweaking their contents), and actually coding. To my complete lack of surprise, the project never achieved a working milestone and was cancelled. What did surprise me was that a coworker who was sympathetic to my grumbling persuaded the CTO who was trying to rescue the project to let me try it my way. On my own (using Perl and PostgreSQL), in a couple of weeks, I had a fully working prototype. We got the green light to proceed and built the company's flagship product on that stack. It was not my brilliant engineering as much as Perl's extraordinary ability to connect mind and machine (coupled of course with my brilliant engineering) that made it possible. I owe Larry Wall for a huge career boost.