Ruth Holloway at Red Hat's marketing site, OpenSource.com, has a retrospective on three decades of perl covering some history and a few of the top user groups. The powerful and flexible scripting language perl turns 30 at the end of this year. It is a practical extraction and reporting language widely used even today and has a dedicated community. It's ease of use and power made it the go-to tool through the boom of the 90's and 00's when the WWW was growing exponentially. However, its flexible syntax, while often an advantage, also functions as a sort of Rorschach test. One that some programmers fail. Perhaps two of its main strengths are pattern matching and CPAN. The many, mature perl modules available from CPAN make it a first choice for many when needed to draft something quickly or deal with a quick task.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by forkazoo on Thursday October 12 2017, @07:09AM
Perl's enthusiasm for things like regex as a first-class language feature tend to mean that a lot of ugly perl gets written. Compare that to a language like Python where readable use of whitespace is considered a first class language feature, and it's not shocking that Python tends to be more readable than Perl in practice. Sure, it's possible to write ugly code in any language. But Perl is a language where it tends to be easy to make things ugly.