It's also currently in the last paragraph of the introduction of the Perl Wikipedia page.
Perl 5... has been nicknamed "the Swiss Army chainsaw of scripting languages" because of its flexibility and power, and also its ugliness.
Personally I find Perl code beautiful, but even Learning Perl 6th Edition says (not sure which specific author included it):
Perl is kind of ugly. This is true. The symbol of Perl has become the camel, from the cover of the venerable Camel book (also known as Programming Perl)... Camels are kind of ugly, too. But they work hard, even in tough conditions. Camels are there to get the job done despite all the difficulties, even when they look bad and smell worse and sometimes spit at you. Perl is a little like that.
Just another Perl hooker - My clients appreciate that I keep my code clean but my comments dirty.
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Thanks for the reference perldigious!
I too like the look and feel of Perl code. From my own personal experience, it was the sigil stuff when dealing with references that gets most people and turns them away. A few years ago, I wrote yet another reference tutorial to kind of combat that in hopes just one more read from another perspective would help those that have reached that 'hump'.
However, once refs are understood and you grasp them, then there isn't another programming language that I haven't been able to learn since. C, C++, Python, Javascript/jQuery, C# etc. I believe firmly that if I hadn't of tried to figure out that accounting system in Perl in my early years and picked up that "Perl in 21 days" book off of the shelf, I may not have become a coder at all.
ps. I used to use the statement "I am not a programmer" for many years. Now I proudly claim that I'm not necessarily a programmer, but I can definitely code. All thanks to the Swiss Army Chainsaw.
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