Re^2: Let's face it, Perl *is* a scripting language

[Ovid]

You can read some of the differences in this old perlfaq.

Just imagine trying to build a scalable system without lexical variables! When I did that in COBOL, we had horrible variable names like WS-GLJ0030R-ACCT-LIMIT to avoid collisions. Real fun! Oh, and in Perl 4, you had true globals by forcing variables whose names began with underscores into main::. This is often a convenience and you can see remants of this with variables like $_, $1, and so on. However, for programming larger systems, encouraging user-supplied globals is bad.

[nevyn]

So as someone else who started, many years ago, with Perl 5 ... I'd have to say, doesn't this take away from your argument? I've seen my share of "not great" perl, and most of it still used lexically scoped vars (AIUI Perl 4 used typeglobs a lot more too ... but that's also something I don't see).

If anyone said "oh, isn't that just a scripting language" to me recently, I'd be tempted to reply "What, like Java?"