zlacker

When I was doing undergrad CS in 2006, we had a choice between Perl and Python for our scripting assignments. As far as I know, no one chose Perl. It's comparatively a huge pain to get ramped up on, and the promised payoff is that you get all these implicitly stateful sigils that let you write contest-winning one-liners. But by the early 2000's, the culture was getting up to speed on obvious-in-retrospect principles like "avoid global variables" and "you should give your variables names that someone else can understand", and even as students we could all see that Perl wasn't going to be the future.

>>oconno+(OP)
I chose Perl first. At that time around early 2000s it was the more popular. I liked how my scripts were short and compact but then I I had noticed that I couldn't understand what I did week or so later. The "write-only language" joke was kind of true for me. Then remember finding Python and rewriting all my script in Python and have been using it ever since.