[alexpotato]

> Looking at the long term contributors, readable or un-readable code seems to be more about the person than the language. Unsurprisingly, the person who produced the most unreadable, unmaintainable code is now doing the same in a new Python only project.

I would totally agree.

I learned Perl after first learning Basic(and Visual Basic) then Java.

Coming from Java meant that I always tried to use clear variable names, good comments, broke my code into small and simple functions etc. I repeatedly had people say to me "Wow! I didn't know you could do that in Perl!"

A lot of Perl's bad reputation came from sysadmins and other busy folks who either weren't familiar with good syntax or were in a hurry and basically were playing Perl Golf to get things done quickly. This is probably where the line "Perl is a write only language" came from.

I will concede that Python and it's forced indenting leads to much easier to read code for beginners. That being said, trying to understand what's going on with advanced Pandas usage written by Numpy wizards is no walk in the park either.

I also totally agree that the Perl one liner is still my go to even though I do everything else in Python these days.