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> What's wrong in Perl? It lets one easely develope ugly code? It encourages one to develop ugly code, and makes it almost impossible to develop anything else. I have yet to see any Perl code that I would consider elegant or clever, let alone straightforward and maintainable. I would rather maintain Fortran that had been mechanically translated from COBOL by an undergrad's Visual Basic program than any of the gems of Perl I've ever found littering the Internet. Larry Wall designed a language that has the illusion of the rambling accidental incongruities of English, without any of the charm and flexibility of that mongrel language. It's complex, convoluted, and superficially casual, but when you come right down to it there isn't really "more than one way to do it", there's simply many ways to write the one true way. There are languages that really do have the flexibility and expressiveness claimed for Perl, but they do so not because of a baroque syntax but because they put syntax in the hand of the programmer rather than guiding his hand from afar. Lisp, Forth, Smalltalk, APL, and the many languages derived from them. Languages you can weird, where you can say "There's glory for you" without finding that the Academie Francais has changed the syntax for "glory" in the next edition and all your clever little puns have become one with the snows of yesteryear. Except that you can't write "yesteryear" because Larry Wall didn't think of making that one of his rigidly constrained areas of doubt and uncertainty. Perl is like a Victorian grammarian wandering into a room where Edward Lear and Duke Ellington are having a grand old time combining "The Miller's Tale" and "Jabberwocky" with impromptu jazz, and declaring that he's had the really ripping idea of putting the "if" at the end of the sentence... quite unaware that the ensuing uproar is laughing-at, not laughing-with. Oh, if only Larry Wall were Finnish, so he would have been inspired by a language that had actual syntax. He might then have understood where syntax was a foundation and where it was a crutch. Instead he treated it as a plaything and ensnared every programmer following in a cage as complex as a sonnet or limerick... producing one digital McGonagall after another who manages to cram blank verse into the form of a clerihew and imagines this to be liberating.There's stuff above here
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