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> Expressive quality is in the eye of the beholder, no? This appears to be > about as fruitful as trying to convince someone that Chagall is a great > artist. No thanks. If Perl was designed as an art form like Befunge I wouldn't have any problem with it. It's all kinds of artistic, yes. > It was inferred, whether you intended it or not. That's the point. You > are attacking things using words like "awkward" when these things are not > awkward when used well, assuming the person looking at it knows Perl. I'm the mad Australian on a skateboard who throws a stack of Adventure printouts in ten different languages at you in the enhanced Berkeley adventure. I dig programming languages, learning new programming languages is one of the things I do for fun. I don't dislike Perl because I don't know it, I dislike Perl because it's a badly designed (if that word can be applied to something that's grown so organically) languages. The syntax is awkward, overcomplex, has too many obscure special cases (there's to many obvious examples to list, I'll just mention one of the obscure ones: the way scalars and collections in for loops are treated), and the result is that you have to not just "know Perl" you have to be a Perl language lawyer just to avoid wandering into a dark alley and getting figuratively mugged by some cool feature. And, again, any reflective language, even one with as simple a syntax as Lisp or Scheme, has more expressive quality. Let's say I want to express a multi-way conditional. In Perl, there's no switch, there's half a dozen alternate ways to do the same thing but none of them actually express the operation being performed. In any reflective language if there's no such construct you can create one that has EXACTLY the behaviour you need. That's "expressive quality". In Perl, well, you can put the conditional after the statement. That's a "cool feature". I hate Perl, and the more I learn about it the more I hate it.There's stuff above here
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