Yep, I like to compare Perl to an old song "I'm every woman it's all in me".²
It combines most aspects of bash, lisp and C.*
Unfortunately it's° badly managed, in the early 2000 it should have invaded the ecosystem of Bash and respond to the DSL needs of Ruby folks and incorporate a fast OOP system a la Moo
That's probably the downside of having a very tolerant user base and giving a say to everyone.
Pythonistas are in my experience not that tolerant, I had numerous encounters where they kept mobbing other languages and in the end it turned out I even knew their "own" language better.
*) and heavily influenced other now main stream languages like PHP, JS and Ruby. Especially the latter is mostly Perl with "nicer" syntax and OO system.
Roughly Ruby := Perl - Bash + Smalltalk
°) in retrospective
²) Chaka not Whitney |