[olavk]

> Since when is it reasonable to judge a language on how the amateurs use it, instead of the professionals?

Well, if you want to judge the appropriateness of a language for a given task, you will have to consider how it is going to be used by the people actually using it.

Maybe some super-disciplined Perl-gurus can write beautiful Perl code, but since Perl actively encourage ugly and unmaintainable code, the average developer will produce better code in a language like say Python which encourages readable code.

You can write ugly code in any language, and you can write beautiful code in any language. But that definitively does not mean that all languages are equally good at supporting and encuraging clean and maintainable code!

[Mithaldu]

> gurus

It doesn't take a guru. Only anyone who actually cares about readability or learned from recent books like Ovid's Beginning Perl or chromatic's Modern Perl.

The main problem Perl has is not anything to do with its language. It's all the old books from the 90s (that some diehard still recommend), but which teach outright shit when it comes to readable or reliable code.

[zzzcpan]

Clean and beautiful code has nothing to do with it being easy to understand or maintain. Those things are the result of proper abstractions, tests, documentation, etc. No language is going to teach amateurs that.