>>It is what I would call a write-only language.
I get a bit of vertigo, here...
You really left about a decade ago -- and don't seem to know much about what has happened since. But you have opinions?!
(If you wonder what is wrong with that quote, check the Best Practices book. [Edit: And as someone noted, chromatic's "Modern Perl" is good.] And so on.)
But the real joke here, are the upvotes. wtf?
Edit: For the third time... :-) "Write only language" is just trolling. PBP by Conway is the standard work on layout, variable naming etc etc. It is from 2005...
Also, of course I have opinions just like you. I told my story. And some people liked it and upvoted. I don't get why that deserves a "wtf" other than trying to rally people to downvote me.
To quote myself, re "write-only language":
>>If you wonder what is wrong with that quote, check the Best Practices book.
Was that really so hard? (I might add that PBP isn't directly new... Then we have Moose, which is the best OO system among the scripting languages, etc...)
Edit: I might comment on this part, that "po" added afterwards:
>>Also, of course I have opinions just like you.
Well, I don't go and write standard troll comments from ten years ago in language discussions...
Edit: If I should touch your point, too... the OP's complaints are literally about 1990s system administrators, which weren't really programmers. You'll get bad code in any language without coding standards, etc.
Perl doesn't bash you over the head and make you use objects by making "int" an object, but they're there if you need them.
( And if you really need to, you can make int at least look like an object )
While I loved the language, I can't imagine going back to it. Now perl programs look like cat typing to me. It was way too expressive. The TIMTOWDI mentality meant that I could never read code I didn't write myself, and even some that I did. It was terse and dense like poetry and hard to understand - like poetry. To really "know" the language meant knowing a huge surface area full of exceptions and special conditions.
Sure, you could limit yourself to certain best-practices and styles but it was like being handing the keys to the porsche and told to only drive 35. At every turn, the language was begging you to flex that newly acquired knowledge of special syntax. The obfuscation contests, the perl poetry, the quines… Many languages have this failing in my opinion and it certainly matters more when you're working in a large team (hence, rigid boring old Java) but Perl taught me what it was like to go too far down that path.
It is what I would call a write-only language.