[greggman3]

I have disliked perl since I first started using it because it clear it's a hack with hack upon hack of fixes to try to wallpaper over how bad it is.

For example, IIRC it's pretty clear it used to be all variables were global. The solution was a manual command to push a variable onto the stack. That's a horrible solution as it requires perfection everywhere.

Another is all the special meaning but global variables like $_, $. $/ $, $\ $" $; $: $# etc etc.

Any one with any engineering experience learns quick that features like that are an anti-pattern. They're super fragile. Some lines of code down stream are expecting one of those variables to have a certain value. A simple edit somewhere can break it all.

The only languages worse are sh and dos batch files.

[lizmat]

This is one if the reasons that the Perl 6 project started (now known as the Raku Programming Language). Raku only has three of these special (lexical) variables left:

  $_    the topic
  $/    result of the last match
  $!    the last exception caught

An overview: https://docs.raku.org/language/5to6-perlvar