Quote Originally Posted by pmasiar View Post
lnodstal submitted good rant against Perl. Money para: "it's not that perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done, and on top of it, it punishes conscientiousness and quality craftsmanship -- put simply: you can commit any dirty hack in a few minutes in perl, but you can't write an elegant, maintainabale program that becomes an asset to both you and your employer; you can make something work, but you can't really figure out its complete set of failure modes and conditions of failure. "

To enliven the discussion here , I'll add my own link: The Problems of Perl: The Future of Bugzilla. Author claims "Perl would not be my first choice for writing or maintaining a large project, such as Bugzilla." And then substantiates that claim with facts based on experience with Bugzilla - one of the most popular bug tracking package. It is not the only, even if it was one of the first open-source bug trackers, bacause of being build in Perl. many developers build competing packages, to avoid Perl.

This, I hope (likely in vain ), will keep discussion about Perl out of other threads. We'll see.

Edit: OK maybe I misspoke. I do not want to restrict discussion about Perl per se, I want to limit discussion about pro and con of Perl in other threads, and put it here, in context, so we don't have to repeat same arguments again and again.
I read the article on Bugzilla and it was much more readable given that the author wasn't blasting away at Perl programmer's integrity. Inodstal's arguement is biased and, as a result, is difficult to take seriously because rather than cite examples, he or she just talks about ethical matters like hacking. I recently started programming in Perl and love Hash tables. What I don't like is a thinking pattern that emerges, e.g., negation. Rather than saying if(not A) you can write unless(A) which is problematic because I have a possitive manner of thinking rather than negative. Which brings me to my other point: people don't like that Perl is flexible and, therefore, refuse to learn how other programmer script in Perl.