I can see that there's visible hate for Perl. As a disclaimer, I'm not much of a Perl programmer, though I intend on sharpening my skills with it after I'm don

I can see that there's visible hate for Perl. As a disclaimer, I'm not much of a Perl programmer, though I intend on sharpening my skills with it after I'm done with a few other projects. It appears that it's been trendy to hate Perl for a while now, with the often repeated argument that it looks like line noise. Yet I've seen plenty of people praise APL for its obscure design, even though it is the definitive unreadable language. To the uninitiated at least, but that's the point. I haven't used it, but I don't hate it, and I think it deserves praise for being a non-Von Neumann language. The thing is, Perl is pretty much the hacker's language. TMTOWTDI, although allowing for inconsistency, also makes it a highly flexible tool and allows for people to hack together code, be it prototyping or for real use, fairly quickly and to their own preferences. With first-class regexes it's also invaluable for text processing and sysadmin tasks for which a shell script becomes tedious. The CPAN is also exhaustive and has solutions for so many tasks, making Perl a very tempting language for scripting and general problem solving. Ultimately, Perl is a tool and it serves a very good purpose. It has the potential for abuse and its philosophy is based on individuality and being able to take several approaches, but that's what makes it beautiful. Letting go of the line noise mentality and getting to know the language better helps.