I'm having to pick up some perl now, and while I don't interact with the community, it surely _feels_ like it was written by wizards, for wizards. Obscure, non-intuitive oneliners, syntax that feels like it was intentionally written to be complicated, and a few other things that feel impossible to understand without reading the docs. (Before everyone jumps on me - yes, as a developer, I should be able to read documentation. And I did. But until I did so, what the code was doing was completely opaque to me. That feels like bad language design.)

Some of it I recognize as being an artefact of the time, when conciseness really mattered. But it's still obnoxious in 2025.

The whole thing reminds me of D&D, which is full of classes & spells that only exist in modern D&D because of One Guy who happened to be at the table with Gygax, who really wanted to be a wuxia guy he saw in a movie, or because he really wanted a spell to be applicable for that one night at the table, and now it's hard-coded into the game.

Perl made a mistake, the language was invested in depth of expression and that, in a programming language, just leads to a 1000 ways to write same thing where like... 2 of them are actually nice to read.

Pyton was ("was" was used here on purpose) the opposite, the whole "one way to do a thing" and insisting on more clean code even if more verbose.

You could write nice looking Perl code but you had to choose to do it, while Python pushed you in that direction from the start.

As much as I dislike using whitespace as flow control it also does make sure the code is always indented reasonably even if it is a newbie just starting in the language.

It didn't help that Perl, just like other languages after (PHP, JS, Python too), had a "curse of the newbie language", with many people starting with it (as at the time it was kinda only sensible choice for webpages before mod_php did a revolution in how most webpages are hosted), with no training and just winging it, which in language that puts no limits on what user can do and no guidance on what they should do... leads to that ugly one liners and line noise as a code scripts.

> I always found the Perl "community" to be really off-putting with all the monk and wizard nonsense

The Perl community introduced the world to the first language module repositories via CPAN. No more manually hunting down tarballs off FTP servers

As a language, Perl is extremely expressive, which is amazing for one-off scripts, and awful for code that's meant to be shared and/or reread. For pure text-munging, Perl is still unbeaten, when using Perl-Compatible regexes in other languages, I feel the language getting in my way.

You can write easy-to-read Perl (TIMTOWTDI, and all that), but it doesn't force you like Go (small language size) or Python (by convention and culture, on what counts as 'Pythonic')

I don’t know about the wider Perl community, but I listened to some interviews from Larry Wall and he just came across as a nerdy guy having fun with what he’s doing. I quite liked listening to him.

I actually think it works when you are in the ecosystem fulltime for a good while.

But having to interact with it once in a while is always a hurdle. The same with bash. Do I use [ or [[? Where does the semi-colon go? if then fi, but while do done (and not elihw). -eq or =? Functions have () but no parameters.

I'm sure those things make sense when all you write is Bash / Perl, but it's daunting.

Now, Python can get pretty far out there too with Meta-programming, and JavaScript can get confusing with prototyping. And Ruby (especially RoR) takes the crown, where they resolve variables at the moment the line executes. Makes debugging blocks really hard.

The less magic in code the better.

> I always found the Perl "community" to be really off-putting with all the monk and wizard nonsense.

Rubyists vs. Pythonistas isn't any better.

Programming languages as counter-cultural lifestyle choices is pretty "cringe" as the kids say.

This made me smile given Python's love of Monty Python references - the cheese shop etc.

The syntax problems are just surface. There are some real problems underneath:

Poor performance of the single implementation.

A single implementation.

Leaky ref counted GC, but 'luckily' the syntax for references is so clunky that nobody does anything complicated enough that it really matters.

Bolted on object oriented features that never got the love they needed at a time when oo languages were sweeping the world.

Most of the wizards decamping to a new language (Perl6) that was 'developed' for years without an actual implementation to keep them grounded.

I've always found Perl just plain ugly, too clever about some things (like iterating over regex matches on stdin or something) and really dumb about other things (variable syntax, the god-awful OOP system). Python is clean and pretty in comparison and usually well thought out. If the communities were reversed, I'd still prefer Python: I just read the documentation in 99% of cases, I very rarely need to interact with the community. Python, as the article says, is mostly not a language for fans - it's mostly for auxiliary tasks.

> Perl has always “flowed” for me and made mostly intuitive sense. Every other language I’ve had to hack on to get something done is a struggle for me to fit into some rigid-feeling mental box

That is just how I felt about Perl (4 years full time dev in the 2000s) and how I now feel about https://raku.org (aka Perl6). Anyway, I tried to gather some fellow feelings here about 18 months ago:

https://rakujourney.wordpress.com/2024/05/22/perl-love-notes...

It is sad that Perl became so despised after the error of preannouncing a non-compatible upgrade. I understand that people couldn't wait. But Raku is here now and it is worth a second look imo.

I loved Perl and all the obscurity. It felt like black magic back then. It should have become what python is today.

Perl is a sysadmin language. There's "always" been this tension between sysadmins and developers.

In my mind (developer back then) I'd amateur-psychoanalyze all of that nonsense as some kind of inferiority complex meant to preserve the self image. Needless complexity can be a feature!

And now we are all developers!

I never interacted with any of that, to me Perl was always "Bash with text processing built-in and no string interpolation pitfalls". I reach for it when I need to write one to two page long utility scripts. Python is too willing to deprecate features (plus the whole 2 to 3 fiasco burned me badly), so I only use it for things I know I will maintain. Perl is for writing a shell script that will run unchanged in perpetuity.