The worst parts are the conversations of the form: Would you use something like perl for this? Why not? Python has 100% of the “write only” problems you mention, except that there are less syntactic clues to help the reader.

sigh

(And for the record, I’ve dealt with 100K+ sloc perl and python projects, and the perl one was more maintainable than the python projects, even after multiple python rewrites. It doesn’t have to go that way, but it certainly can!)

On the flip side, being forced to use Perl always sucks.

I mean it only as a half joke, unfortunately.

I would love to be forced to use Perl :)

As a side note, "forced" often means "we have a lot of beginners here and they want to do Python".

Find a job maintaining some legacy code (there's plenty of it there). At which point you'll quickly realise that maintaining a complex perl program (particularly that someone else wrote) is painful. And the only remaining production perl programs are complex or they would have been rewritten.

I would not mind actually.

Better than rewriting failing Python or Node projects once a year.

Better than Java or VB by a long way. You can do most stuff just not as cryptically.

The only thing I miss about Perl was the immediacy of the regexes. There's a LOT I won't miss.

If you want that regex behaviour in a more modern language than Perl5 then Ruby is there.