[rrwo]

Badly-written Perl code from the 1990s is not the fault of the language.

It's the fault of the non-programmers who read "Learn Perl in 2 hours and become a millionaire" books, had a massive s*t on a keyboard and started a business with it

[lmm]

And yet those non-programmers who instead "read "Learn Python in 2 hours and become a millionaire" books, had a massive s*t on a keyboard and started a business with it" tend to have ended up with something significantly less horrible to maintain.

[rrwo]

It really has to do with the "programmer" and not the language.

Those learn to program and make fast money books were a product of the 1990s, and they appealed to people who cared more about making money than about producing any kind of product.

For example, I once had to fix some code that was supposed to delete files that were sitting in a directory for more than a week.

Rather than do something sane and simple, like look for files where the mtime was less than a cutoff and delete them, it looked for files where the absolute difference between the age and 7 days ago was 0. So it had the side effect of deleting things that were 7 days old, or were less than a day old. It also missed things that happened to be older than 7 days old.

(And nevermind that it was written because people couldn't bother to figure out why files were stuck in the directory.)

The company's codebase was filled with nonsense like that.

The person who wrote that would not have written anything better in Python or anything else.

But from the outside it worked well enough and they made a lot of money.