[nkozyra]

Perl is the language I once understood when I used it everyday but now look at with utter confusion. It's definitely not a casual language.

As a comparison, I peeked at some Delphi/pascal code I'd written and a book a few weeks back and it was still parseable by my brain years later.

[tootie]

No languages are casual. I wrote Perl for about 5 years and was super productive with, but haven't looked it for quite a while. Most energy these days goes into JavaScript/node and it devolves into gibberish really, really quickly. The community really dove into the punctuation-based syntax, preprocessors and meta languages head first and created a real Frankenstein. And they'll complain that Java or C# are too verbose and slow to work with.

[futureastronaut]

> The community really dove into the punctuation-based syntax, preprocessors and meta languages head first and created a real Frankenstein.

More is on the way. Github issue thumbs up-driven development means it's the new C++ kitchen sink.

[nkozyra]

> No languages are casual.

Not sure I agree with that. Languages which share widely used conventions and syntax can be picked back up much more quickly.

[badsectoracula]

I've been writing Pascal and Delphi for more than 25+ years and C and C++ for around 20 years and a bunch of other languages for at least a decade, yet even with the tons of additions that Free Pascal has added over the years i always find Pascal code way more readable than C or (especially) C++ code. It helps that the Free Pascal developers try to keep the syntax for new stuff "Pascal-ish".