zlacker

My problem with PERL was always that there's just too many things to remember, particularly if the code I'm debugging was written by someone who knows the language well. I'd be on a PERL project for awhile, then get pulled off to do Java or Ruby or whatever. By the time I needed to do PERL again, I had to go back and relearn everything. I never had that problem with Java, Ruby, Python, or Javascript.

Also, PERL allows you to write the most unmaintainable code I've ever seen. I ran across a single line of PERL that would read a buffer, do some simple data transformations, add framing information (some of it derived from the data like length, data type, and checksum), and then write out the completed buffer.

It was beautiful. And also completely unmaintainable. Even the guy who wrote it didn't remember how it worked and had to fiddle with it for twenty minutes before he remembered a variable he used was getting set as a side effect of something else later in the line. That's great for a programming contest, but not so much for production code you may be tasking a newly minted software developer with maintaining.

Granted, you can write maintainable PERL code. But over the years the PERL has been hands down the least maintainable in different jobs and projects.