Interesting, Perl's come a long way since I picked it up in 2001 (and dropped it for Ruby in 2007), but it just doesn't feel organic to the language.
Sadly, things like Perl 5i http://github.com/schwern/perl5i, while awesome in the service they provide the Perl community, just make me wonder why one would even use a language that makes you go there.
Stumbling across a Perl script these days feels like finding an Awk script; it's nostalgic and interesting, but I generally just want to stay away.
Yeah, perl5i is a little much all at once. It feels like, "lets apply as many hacks to the language as possible all at once, for maximum blogability". Adding methods to every class? Random autoboxing? It's like I'm looking at Ruby ;)
But the real point of the article is about how flexible Perl is, and how it has all the stuff from your favorite of Python / Ruby, and also the CPAN. No other language seems to want to steal from Perl, because "it's Perl", but fortunately, we don't have that problem -- we already got over using Perl, and can enjoy the features for what they are, regardless of which religion invented them.
Now is a great time to be a Perl programmer, and it's sad that people dismiss it as "cool like an Awk script" instead of embrace it as "a tool that can save me time when I'm building complex applications". Sigh.
Yeah, perl's bad reputation is undeserved in some ways. My definition of a bad language is one that _forces_ you to code in "bad" ways. There's very little that perl forces you to do. Insofar as it's bad, it's bad in a very different way to, say, VBScript.
unfortunately that logic still only makes perl a neutral language, not a good one.
(i haven't used perl for years, but this isn't intended as a snark against the language, just a comment on the fact that saying something "is not bad" does not necessarily mean that it is "good")
Sadly, things like Perl 5i http://github.com/schwern/perl5i, while awesome in the service they provide the Perl community, just make me wonder why one would even use a language that makes you go there.
Stumbling across a Perl script these days feels like finding an Awk script; it's nostalgic and interesting, but I generally just want to stay away.