[Qcombinator]

A lot of languages — in fact, a lot of software in general — is designed to make things easy for the computer/programmer: "This is how it works and you just have to adapt, deal with it." Larry Wall put a lot of effort into making Perl try to adapt to the way the user already thinks instead, including taking advantage of having studied linguistics to figure out how the "language" part of a computer language fits (or doesn't fit) the way our brains process languages.

The result was a language that has a lot of power and flexibility. People who like Perl tend to love it, because it fits like a tailor-made suit instead of all those off-the-rack languages. People who dislike Perl tend to hate it, because all that power and flexibility can be easily abused (even when you're trying not to — there's a reason so many people buy off the rack instead of making DIY suits).

•https://bigthink.com/videos/why-perl-is-like-a-human-languag...

•https://www.perl.com/pub/1999/03/pm.html/

•https://www.perl.com/pub/2007/12/06/soto-11.html/

[thaumaturgy]

I think there's a greater underlying dichotomy here that's relevant to your tailor-made suit analogy: the people who love Perl tend to be the people who are building and maintaining mostly only their own tooling and (usually small) codebases, and the people who don't love Perl tend to be the ones that are responsible for maintaining large piles of other people's code.

A language that's "tailor-made" for the individual is fantastic when you only have to deal with your own code. You get to write stuff that makes sense to you. It doesn't matter if it's unconventional or doesn't make sense to anyone else -- it fits the way that your brain works.

But when cooperating on larger projects with lots of other people involved, this backfires remarkably. You now need to understand the way that half a dozen or more other brains work.

As software development has gradually shifted away from the published efforts of lone hackers and towards the collaborative efforts of teams of specialized people, Perl's "TMTOWTDI" approach has made it a far more expensive language to develop software in than all of the alternatives.

[Jeema101]

Do you have any data to back up the claim that it's "a far more expensive language to develop software in than all of the alternatives"?

I feel like most scripting languages are pretty similar in terms of productivity based on my own experiences anyway...

[thaumaturgy]

I was stating a syllogism there: understanding and working with different coding styles is difficult, increased difficulty adds increased expense, and Perl supports many different coding styles.

As far as I know, nobody's done a comprehensive cost analysis of similar software built using different languages, methodologies, or architectures. Certainly nothing recent. I've harped on this before quite loudly and I think it's one of the reasons our industry can't be called "engineering".

People's individual experiences just don't make for good enough data because there are too many confounding variables.

[gerikson]

> A language that's "tailor-made" for the individual is fantastic when you only have to deal with your own code.

I think this is spot on.