I find it disheartening how much people trash talk Perl, while other languages that are extremely similar (JavaScript, Python, Ruby all share much more with Perl than they do with, say, Haskell or Go or ML), get a pass. It's become trendy to do so, to the point where people who clearly have never learned Perl or worked with it feel entitled to speak with authority on it. Taking it to the point of dismissing anything Perl's creator has ever said (as one of the commenters on this wiki page does) is absurd and means not listening to an extremely bright technologist (I mean, c'mon, Larry invented patch, the basis of a tremendous amount of awesome in modern software development!).
There are misfeatures in Perl, certainly, but there are roughly as many misfeatures in JavaScript. It's silly to dismiss it as "awful" when there's so much that is clearly nice about the language for many categories of problem.
There are misfeatures in Perl, certainly, but there are roughly as many misfeatures in JavaScript. It's silly to dismiss it as "awful" when there's so much that is clearly nice about the language for many categories of problem.