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from the There’s-more-than-one-way-to-do-it,-but-sometimes-consistency-is-not-a-bad-thing-either dept.
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 The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday October 12 2017, @09:17AM
Reading a highly optimized perl script is no more difficult than reading highly optimized C. You need mastery of the language rather than casual familiarity to do either. If you have that mastery, neither are difficult to read unless intentionally made so.
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