Re: "There are some stunningly novel ideas in Perl" -- Paul Graham

[adrianh]

As usual it's an excellent read, and as usual he makes reference to Perl, as usual damning it with faint praise.

Personally, I didn't think it was very faint. Quite the opposite. I've always had the impression that PG rather likes Perl - probably because of the stuff it stole from LISP ;-)

I'll also admit I'm probably standing too close to see the forest for the trees, so you tell me, what is stunningly bad in Perl?

For me stunningly bad things are:

• The cryptic $\, etc. variables.
• Lack of good encapsulation.

Those two things alone would remove 90% of the FUD I have to deal with when advocating Perl.

The Perl 5 VM is also a very, very scary thing (well - the source code scares me anyway :-) Messing with the op/parse tree at run time can be hugely useful since you can create domain specific languages really easily. A good abstract VM makes this simple (yay Parrot!)

(Please include the standard "I like perl and think its advantages more than outweigh its disadvantages" disclaimer ;-)