So many single/double char operators which need to be memorised with Perl, before you can start comprehending the programs.
Not to mention Perl hackers used to pride themselves on super succinct code - in certain circles it use to be popular to include one liners to do complex stuff in email signatures.
(Not complaining though, Perl was the first language I used, and probably the simplest for text file processing in CGI's back in the day.)
How do you do that in other languages? Whatever language that you will ever use will require you to understand and to a degree memorize your usual keywords, operators and syntax elements and rules concerning interplay between them.
Regarding other stuff, building good software requires understanding a lot of things which have nothing to do with Perl. Understanding concepts like recursion, closure, OO, functional programming concepts etc etc. These have to be first understood in theory. The Perl syntax is only a notation in which you express your ideas. Besides that designing good software requires people to understand design patterns, designing maintainable software requires people to work on large project under sound practices. Writing fast and efficient software requires people to learn Algorithms and data structures. And so on...
These principles remain the same regardless of the programming language you use. Then why is it that only in case of Perl people hold the language responsible for everything. To be frank, I have seen crappy code more often in other languages than in Perl. I have seen over abuse of certain element like XML in Java, and now these days Python.
The fact is if your technology community is huge you get a lot of crappy people along with your usual set of good people. This happens for various reasons, Everybody wants to learn something that is famous as it helps for Job reasons.
Perl's strength apart from your usual language kit is CPAN, language tools to produce highly useful rapid scripts in time. Heavy data lifting, data munging. A gentle glance at things like Moose, Modern Perl, Devel::Declare and all associated software with them(Catalyst, DBIx::Class), will show you the genius of Perl community in coming up such great stuff in time.
>Not to mention Perl hackers used to pride themselves on super succinct code - in certain circles it use to be popular to include one liners to do complex stuff in email signatures.
One of my favorite examples of that was back when DVD John released DeCSS, and some Perl hackers turned it into a 7-line Perl script:
So many single/double char operators which need to be memorised with Perl, before you can start comprehending the programs.
Not to mention Perl hackers used to pride themselves on super succinct code - in certain circles it use to be popular to include one liners to do complex stuff in email signatures.
(Not complaining though, Perl was the first language I used, and probably the simplest for text file processing in CGI's back in the day.)