[lmm]

> Huh, this is such an unusual design goal in programming languages "just try something and it'll probably work"

Perl was famously that way. It's great for the initial write but not so good for maintenance.

[mst]

Very very handy for people just learning (what's often referred to as "baby perl" in an affectionate rather than derogatory way).

Learning to use perl -properly- is a whole other barrel of monkeys though.

(it does have the advantage that it's very easy to spot code written by a confused perl programmer, whereas I've experienced a number of unfortunate events where python code initially looked fine but turn out to be logically utterly confused; this is not a complaint about python, though it does darkly amuse me)