I like Perl for two outstanding reasons:
- It is a disaster, but I'd rather walk freely through a salvage yard than under escort in an office building. I find that I can attribute a great deal of my growth as a programmer directly to the fact that in giving me freedom, Perl encourages me to ask continually whether what I'm doing is the better way to do it. There is more than one way to do it, and so it's up to me to decide which way I will. In other words, it is the programmer's responsibility to generate the norms by which he/she codes, rather than laboring under the dictates of an overbearing compiler. This in turn provides opportunity for reflection upon practices, and thus learning. As incredulous as this may sound, I find I've become enamoured with the bare-bones, "bolted-on" nature of Perl's support for object-oriented programming, because it causes me to think about the nature of different OO models, and to figure out which is appropriate for a given scenario.
- Perl is wierd, and perlies are wierder. I can't tell you how much I appreciate looking at the documentation of a tool, or the code for some CPAN module, and glimpsing the personality behind it. It's not vetted and sterilized by a public relations department, it's not the result of a policy handed down from on high, but rather the result of an individual's personal commitment and passion. To be fair I guess this is largely true of the open-source world in general, but I'm of the opinion that the nature of Perl itself reinforces the expression of personality.
