Perl is 25 years old today

This one is a real perl see --

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http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7617852/whats-the-differe...

Before i switched to Python as my general purpose language, i used to be a bit of a Perl fanatic.

I've still to come across a language that lets you get your ideas down as quickly. It's full of fantastic time savers, e.g. the for() construct and the format output functionality cover a bunch of common use cases in minimal keystrokes (let me pipe in some data, analyse it, then spit it out in a clean report).

It can hurt readability but for small one offs, it often doesn't matter.

Here is another article covering a good deal of detail about Perl in its first 25 years, Its a great read: http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/12/the-first-twenty-five...

You have chosen a very small topic to discuss the vast range of advantages TIMTOWDI offers.

Now bear with me for a minute while I explain you this whole thing.

Have you worked with a language where your though tool just wasn't for you? Have you felt that language was pushing down its own self believed principles down your throat? What happens when programmers face such situations? They just leave the tool and go to something else. Perl is one of those few tools that adapts to the programmer, rather than expecting the programmer adapt to it.

Now like every other design choices you can ever make, it has its own tradeoffs. Being flexible, adaptive, powerful and quick to evolve means at times you have to sacrifice a little consistency. You can sure present your arguments and your design perspective against it, but your design again will have its own trade offs.

Why so many different ways of doing things? For example why do we have something like 'map' and 'foreach' in Perl? You won't understand this when you have used and written code that leverages these keywords to their power. Its more or less like explaining why Ice cream is delicious to somebody who has never eaten it. Unless you taste it yourself won't truly understand.

Perl is quick to learn. You can learn as much Perl to do the kind of work you can do in Python/Java/whatever. But as you learn more Perl, you become productive at solving problems. You can do it quickly, with succinct code with more powerful syntactical features.

EDIT:Corrected typo.

The stats in the link are interesting. I recently discovered the Code::Statistics module (https://metacpan.org/module/Code::Statistics). It tells you the cyclomatic complexity of your code which wikipedia tells me is basically the number of possible paths through your code.

It might be fun to see that run against the Perl core.

I also like looking at the number of lines of code. If your features go up while complexity and lines of code go down -- that could be a good sign.