zlacker

> A lot of people just dislike Perl's weird syntax and behavior.

As much as I liked Perl back in the day, it did sometimes earn its reputation as a write-only language!

>>dspill+(OP)
Not to mention that trying to understand existing Perl by asking the community 'what does this do' or 'how does this work' often (in my experience) resulted in 'RTFM' or 'man perldoc' rather than someone taking any time to actually answer the question, whereas other communities were more welcoming and helpful to each other. That made it difficult to learn Perl through other people's code compared to other languages.

>>dspill+(OP)
My impression was experienced Perl programmers took pride in making the smallest code possible, all in one line.

At my company they really locked in the project being dead if the original contributors left.

Perl propped up regex (JavaScript regex is based off of it), so I get the impression Perl practitioners tried to make all the code regex-y as possible as a cultural thing.

>>danude+j6
I had the complete opposite experience. Perlmonks and irc were amazing resources for a budding developer.

>>Tubelo+Fe
There was a regular feature in the perl community for 'golf' or 'crazy one liners' but almost no one used that shit in any actual code that left their user directory.

>>wredco+8q
agreed

>>danude+j6
I think that depended on where you were looking and how you were asking.

My main source of support back when I did much Perl (late 90s, early 00s) was usenet, and while some groups were very snubby and elitist others were very helpful and encouraging for a young budding programmer.

>>Tubelo+Fe
Code golf is fun as a challenge, but it's obviously hell to find in a script someone else wrote that you're supposed to maintain.

>>Tubelo+Fe
I remember the Perl art competitions, where you would write Perl code that would run and actually do something, and would be ASCII art at the same time. Obviously, lots of camels ;-)

>>Tubelo+Fe
> Perl programmers took pride in making the smallest code possible, all in one line

And this became a joke and meme.