Perl
is intuitive, but not for casual programmers. If you're needing to
look up how to get the length of an array, Perl is not for you. Perl is an expert language: very powerful in the hands of experts, but perhaps dangerous to the casual programmer. It's more like a chainsaw than a knife. You must be
this tall to program in Perl. Remember the adage: "Make a language that any fool can use, and only fools will want to use it." I'm glad Perl is not for fools.
Perl does offer genericity at the OO level, provided you follow standard OO design techniques. The low-level things in Perl are not objects, by design. Think of it in physical terms. I can tug on a bed or a desk or a car in a uniform way, but when I get down to the atomic level, the way I attract a proton is different from the way I attract an electron. You're trying to look for orthogonality at the "atomic" level of Perl. No. Stop looking there. Build it at the higher levels, and all will be well. Perl lets you make interesting things, but Perl also lets you make crappy things too.
-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
