[sreque]

I've written a complex ruby library and then ported it to perl. Since both languages are basically the same in their capabilities the port was very straightforward. I know both languages fairly well, but if I go back to the ruby version I can read it just fine, while if I look at the perl version it looks like a morass of symbol soup. The language has so much unnecessary syntactic noise that even what I would consider well-written Perl code that I've personally designed and written is still too difficult to read.

Also, from my personal experience, in general the average quality of Perl code I've seen, whether it's CPAN libraries or code at I see at work, is much less than the average quality Python and Ruby code I see, which is more of a community problem than a language one, although Perl being the way it is seems to attract a certain class of developers I would rather not have to work with.

[jrockway]

I ported a well-known Perl library to Ruby. It looked terrible and didn't work at all.

Turns out the problem is that I don't know Ruby.

[sreque]

I suppose I can't prove to you that I know Perl very well any more than you can prove to me that you actually tried to port a library over to a language without even bothering to learn the language. The latter sounds kind of stupid to me.

[jrockway]

Who told you I wasn't stupid?