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Comment by davidwritesbugs

2 months ago

The joke used to be that Perl code looked like an explosion in an apostrophe factory.

I once accidentally piped an SSL certificate into Perl and got 40+ warnings before it realised it wasn't Perl. I'm not joking.

It may looks chaotic ("explosion") when you don't see the structure.

When you do, you appreciate the density of information.

When I read perl it's like I read a poem: to take a simple example, 'while/until' instead of 'while/while not' creates more beautiful code

Larry Wall has said he likes parenthesis in his LISP like he likes fingernails in his oatmeal. xD Hence, Perl's abilit to forgo parens in many cases.