[arp242]

I wonder how much Larry Wall's background as a linguist has to do with that, which perhaps also explain some of Perl's "messier" features, just like natural language is kind of messy.

I once had a long conversation about this with a linguist and Perl programmer that I randomly met in a pub. However, I was quite drunk and don't really recall too much, and we never saw each other again.

[singingfish]

This is quite an interesting phenomenon, and kind of explains why perl is disliked so much.

Computer programming theory has large swathes of inspiration from theoretical linguistics - think lisp. That's nice for theoreticians because it makes things like parsing easier to think about rigorously. Perl on the other hand, to my knowledge is the only significant programming language to be inspired by practical linguistics, and therefore appeals to concepts like context and ambiguity way more than other languages. This means that a lot of computer scientists academics absolutely hate it, and so it was very much neglected in the education space.

The other side effect of this is you still get a good number of talented programmers with backgrounds in the humanities and social sciences who do very well on perl.