It's unreadable if you write it that way. It's a flexible language with a dozen ways to do most things, and some of those are more legible than others.

I use Python for a lot of the things I used to use Perl for, and one of the biggest benefits is that it constrains your style a lot more, and things look more consistently readable.

> It's unreadable if you write it that way. It's a flexible language with a dozen ways to do most things...

Yes, these are precisely the properties that makes Perl unreadable. This permissiveness is a weakness!

I personally don't use Perl much, but I've seen quite a few scripts written by members of my IT department that I could read top->bottom without any issue whatsoever.

I like Perl, but I can see the argument for why it's not readable. People often mistakenly use sections of code with crazy looking regexes as an example...that's not really the issue though.

To me, it's a combination of two things:

- The culture that it's good to have many ways to do the same thing.

- The abundance of sigils on variables ($, %, @, etc), and how that gets unmanageable once you have complex data structures. Especially once you mix in references.

Yeah that's because it's written by people from IT department. They are supposed to write it in the most readable manner since it's their job.

But like others on the thread said, the inherently extreme flexibility makes it hard to write a consistently readable code. You literally need some sort of discipline to consistently write a readable code.