While I agree that there's been a decided shift towards one-try-language-ism these days, there always were complaints about Perl's readability. Mostly because i

While I agree that there's been a decided shift towards one-try-language-ism these days, there always were complaints about Perl's readability. Mostly because its heydays didn't quite coincide with good programming practice, both the early Perl4 admin scripts that replaced the horrible mish-mash of "standard" user space of the commercial Unices, and later quick-fire CGIs. "Proper" procedures and tooling were less involved there, if they were present in the Perl version of those days in the first place. (And also Python wasn't a horrible feature creep blob back then, so shone in comparison) Perl had and has a lot more to offer than that, but many people didn't come across that. Of course these days purity tests are much more involved, and many people wouldn't even dare touch languages where there's no type system that could launch a 1000 ships of PhD's writing theses about it. ;) Having ranted that, it feels a bit odd to argue about this in a thread about MIDI. Where you're likely to connect to a plethora of synths from the 80s that have the combined computing capacity of a pregnancy test. Where using an Atari ST from '85 to sequence things is still a viable option. Where DIN plugs are the state of the art, like on your oldest Model M.