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Comment by vultour | Hacker News Reader

I worked at a place like this and it was a nightmare. We had a few dedicated Perl programmers who swore there was nothing better since sliced bread, but there were so many legacy Perl programs it spilled into everyone's responsibilities. I know for a fact everybody else absolutely hated having to go in and decipher decades old Perl code.

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You could replace Perl with any language and people would have the same experience.

Most other "popular" languages share a pretty good chunk of their syntax. You can dig through PHP/Java/C#/Go/Javascript/C++/Python pretty easily if you already know one of them. Perl and its magic variables are absolutely undecipherable if you haven't worked with the language before (or in a long time).

>>Perl and its magic variables are absolutely undecipherable if you haven't worked with the language before (or in a long time).

Yeah, either the language gives you magic variables, or you make your own one's in the programs you write. Programming isn't sorcery. Somebody has to write the code for features a language doesn't give you. That the is whole problem in essence, the more minimal your syntax goes, the more code you will write for features the language doesn't give you.

Good part about the Perl magic variables is at least they are documented.

perldoc perlvar will tell you about all the magic variables.

When I learned Perl, the syntax reminded me of C and bash. The magic variables are also from bash.

Maybe because I knew C and some bash and awk, Perl wasn't alien to me at all.

Coming from a Pascal and Java background, it was a breath of fresh air. Programming was actually fun.

That's a problem with the codebase at your place of work, not the language.

> I know for a fact everybody else absolutely hated having to go in and decipher decades old Perl code.

There's genuinely nothing I enjoy more at work than deciphering, debugging, documenting, and ultimately refactoring Perl code. Even if I'm improving it to extinction e.g. turning parts of a legacy stack into a service with an API, ready for a replacement in some other language to be swapped in.

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