zlacker

$_ was one of the things that put me off perl, because the same syntax meant different things depending on context.

The Pragmatic Programmers had just started praising Ruby, so I opted for the that over Perl, and just went with it ever since. Hated PHP and didn't like Python's whitespace thing. I never Ruby on Rails'd either. That said my first interactive website was effectively a hello world button with cgi/perl.

But trying to learn to code from reading other peoples perl scripts was way harder than the (then) newer language alternatives.

Now I'm over 50 none of that is nearly as important. I remember being young and strongly opininated, this vs. that - its just part of the journey, and the culture. It also explains the current FizzBuzz in CSS minimisation post. We do because we can, not necessarily because we should.