It’s a blessing because once you are comfortable with a Perl dialect, writing code is very efficient and fun. Perl is very expressive and can also be very concise. It’s a curse, because reading other people’s dialects can be quite difficult.
> reading other people’s dialects can be quite difficult.
That is why we send any code that cannot be read by a fresh CS grad back for rework. It turns out you can solve everything with very basic and straightforward syntax.
By the time I was done writing Perl, my Perl looked a lot like Python.
It's also why I'm not really all that sympathetic to "but $NEWLANG doesn't let me write something that extracts from a hash and then map all the elements with an inline anonymous function, filter the results, and then invoke them all and put the results in a single array all in one line!". I worked for decades, plural, in languages that did permit that, and what I learned is that the more professional the code gets, the less you should be doing that. By the time you've broken it out in a way that won't confuse everyone, giving all the intermediate values professional-quality names and adding a few comments, it turns out the delta between Perl and things like Java or Go or other such "stodgy" languages has closed a lot. Not 100%, by any means, but closer, and in the meantime those stodgier languages have been steadily closing the gap from their end too. In the meantime I get a lot of value from the static guarantees those languages have.
> but $NEWLANG doesn't let me write something that extracts from a hash and then map all the elements with an inline anonymous function, filter the results, and then invoke them all and put the results in a single array all in one line!
