[guylhem]

Why so much prejudice against Perl on Hacker News??!!

I should know, because I shared the same biased views until I had a job which required quick iterations of complicated computation of a large dataset with limited hardware. I never had really used perl before that, but when it started to save me literally weeks of work I came to love it.

There's a tool for every job.

I think I didn't like Perl before because the code looked hard to understand. But since then I found out first hand one can do shitty C or Python too.

[eru]

Sorry, I just had to suffer some Perl plus Bash and Makefiles big-ball-of-mud at work. Just makes you disgruntled. (We're re-writing that piece in Haskell.)

I don't know how other Perl programs fare. Probably better. Though the syntax makes you cry. And treating things like lists of lists as an advanced topic, that's needs something special like `references'. Did I mention how functions get their parameters? The interpolation in strings can be handy, though.

And I agree about the possibility of bad code in Python and C. (I have some Python nightmare at hand, too.)