[juice_bus]

You could replace Perl with any language and people would have the same experience.

[vultour]

Most other "popular" languages share a pretty good chunk of their syntax. You can dig through PHP/Java/C#/Go/Javascript/C++/Python pretty easily if you already know one of them. Perl and its magic variables are absolutely undecipherable if you haven't worked with the language before (or in a long time).

[rrwo]

When I learned Perl, the syntax reminded me of C and bash. The magic variables are also from bash.

Maybe because I knew C and some bash and awk, Perl wasn't alien to me at all.

Coming from a Pascal and Java background, it was a breath of fresh air. Programming was actually fun.

[kamaal]

>>Perl and its magic variables are absolutely undecipherable if you haven't worked with the language before (or in a long time).

Yeah, either the language gives you magic variables, or you make your own one's in the programs you write. Programming isn't sorcery. Somebody has to write the code for features a language doesn't give you. That the is whole problem in essence, the more minimal your syntax goes, the more code you will write for features the language doesn't give you.

Good part about the Perl magic variables is at least they are documented.

[toast0]

perldoc perlvar will tell you about all the magic variables.