Paul Graham has issued a new essay, The Hundred-Year Language, on what programming will be like in 2103. As usual it's an excellent read, and as usual he makes reference to Perl, as usual damning it with faint praise.

Language design is being taken over by hackers. The results so far are messy, but encouraging. There are some stunningly novel ideas in Perl, for example. Many are stunningly bad, but that's always true of ambitious efforts. At its current rate of mutation, God knows what Perl might evolve into in a hundred years.

What I'd really like to know is, what does he consider stunningly bad? The @_ parameter passing mechanism? Things that the Perl community considers failure themselves (e.g. v-strings, pseudo-hashes)? Absence of a lisp facility, such as macros? Difficulty of manipulating the op-tree at run-time?

Now, I'll admit that there are a number of things in Perl are at best a bit of a botch, but from there to something being stunningly bad...

I'll also admit I'm probably standing too close to see the forest for the trees, so you tell me, what is stunningly bad in Perl?

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