Perl was the first language I learned on my own after graduating university many years ago. I fell in love with it because of quirks like these and because code written in it can have a poetic quality you don't see often. Now I am old and joyless and I want the code I write for work to be boring and unsurprising. But sometimes one can still want to write poetry.
Please show me an example of Perl that looks beautiful. I don't believe you.
Perlsecret – Perl secret operators and constants
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Re: Perlsecret – Perl secret operators and constants
#32Perl was the first language I learned on my own after graduating university many years ago. I fell in love with it because of quirks like these and because code written in it can have a poetic quality you don't see often. Now I am old and joyless and I want the code I write for work to be boring and unsurprising. But sometimes one can still want to write poetry.
Please show me an example of Perl that looks beautiful. I don't believe you.
It might be a generational thing.
When I started out as a sysadmin it was all shell and glue and different syntax on the 8 different flavours of *NIX I worked on between '94 and '97, then I found Perl suddenly you could actually build things that felt "real". It took me straight into web application development by '98, and I'm not sure I would have stayed in this field had it not existed (I was also working in neuro-diagnostics at the time and might have stayed there).
I saw some really elegant stuff written in Perl.
I also saw some absolutely unhinged, impossible-to-maintain garbage.