By the time I picked up Perl, my programming style wasn't nearly as bad as you describe. It wasn't as good as now, and I tended to use globals a little too much, and I tended to think procedurally rather than in terms of context, but I had already come a long way.

This may be because my style had already been improved by using various other languages. From GW-BASIC I learned to use RENUM instead of a lot of extraneous GOTO (though some GOTO is virtually unavoidable in that language, due to lack of nested conditionals). From Pascal I learned even more structure, which revolutionised the way I wrote BASIC. Then I took college courses in assorted other languages, and I'm sure I learned from those too, though I can't point to anything specific (except the data structures and algorithm analysys class). By this time, of course, I was already a prolific commenter, and my comments were starting to have some minimal level of quality. In my spare time I picked up the Inform Designer's Manual, which revolutionised the way I think about objects. Inform was the second language (after BASIC) that I was able to think in. Later the Gnu Emacs Lisp Reference Manual again greatly expanded the way I think about programming, and elisp became the third language I think in. Perl is the fourth, and the best so far, though I have a special fondness for each of these four languages. (The other languages, which I never thought in, but only translated to, I have no special fondness for. Some of them, such as C++, I actively dislike.)

I did write some Perl code I'm not terribly proud of, e.g., the code behind the list of uses for peanut butter (one of my very first projects in Perl), but even that is not nearly as horrific as your description. If you want truly horrible code from me, I'll have to go back to my early years, when I was writing in other languages. I believe I had a word scrambler program in BASIC at one point that was going on a thousand lines and had lots and lots of GOTO statements. At the time, I was proud of it, because it was so much work to write. Now, of course, I'd write it as one line of Perl and play golf with it.

$;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}}
split//,".rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ";$\=$ ;->();print$/
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