I don't use Perl much anymore, but I never had a problem with it when I did. Stop complaining and write some code.
He can't write any more code, because he's dead. But at least he spent his time wisely writing Lisp code instead of Perl.
The road to The Right Way is paved with anxiety, and the road to Worse is Better isn't paved at all.
I wish it would actually contained any concrete reasons. That might be highly interesting.
Not to be taken seriously anymore:
Date: 2000/03/28
Tons of stuff changed.
And Perl 6 is still completely unusable. Proves his point, ehe?
Perl 6 is a different language. Perl 5 is in active development with yearly releases.
Perl 6 is as horrible a mistake as Perl 5 was. It's just taken a decade and it's still unusable. Parrot was a fucking joke. Not figuratively but literally. Unfortunately people without enough perspective took it at face value. And here we are 10 years later.
Why is this not relevant anymore?
Perl 5 has completely supplanted Perl 4 by now.
Ha, if Erik was still among us, he would be downvoted to death in HN. RIP.
Do other languages handle RegExp better? Most newer ones just adopt perl-style RegExp, but the concept is not original to perl. I found it interesting that he singled out RegExp (how to tell if you have a false positive).