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Comment by libeclipse | Hacker News Reader

Thing that really gets me about perl is the syntax, it's horrendous.

No other reason, that's all. Just the syntax.

It's _different_. But working for a few years with Perl 5, it really grew on me. It could use a good "Perl: The Good Parts" book, I guess.

I haven't looked at Perl 6 yet, don't know if that's better or worse. Too many other things to do, and I don't think I'll ever work with Perl professionally again, that ship has probably sailed.

Higher Order Perl might serve for that. (I haven't really read any other Perl books.)

And you can read it for nothing, if you are interested:

http://hop.perl.plover.com/book/pdf/HigherOrderPerl.pdf

The Perl 5 equivalent is Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices

PBP is very good, but pretty desperately needs an update. There might end up being a new version for Perl 6, but I doubt it will ever get one for Perl 5 and that's unfortunate.

Several pretty big recommendations (particularly regarding OOP in Perl) from PBP aren't really regarded as having stood the test of time very well.

Blame Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan. Oh and Larry :)

Why are the awk guys to blame for Perl syntax?

> (It's sorta like sed, but not. It's sorta like awk, but not. etc.)

Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.

    Usenet article <1992Aug26.184221.29627@netlabs.com> (1992) -- Larry Wall

I don't see the problem here... those are good tools and Perl have those tools power in the core language++ Good stuff if you ask me.

The good thing about awk is that it's limited. So you know when to stop using it and move to use a different language when your requirements exceed the comfort zone of awk.

Larry Wall came and made a language inspired by awk that doesn't give feedback on when you're out of the comfort zone. This lets you make a mess before you know what you've done (aka technical debt). The same problem 'that killed Smalltalk and could have killed ruby' too (thanks, Bob Martin).

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