in reply to I think Perl ruined me as a programmer
I think you're not even listing the most time-saving features of Perl. The examples you give are just peanuts, in my opinion. You're not even beginning to touch Perl's real strong points. For example, how many lines does it take to write a universal min function? Not many:
There aren't many other languages that produce such a powerful function (the minimum of any number of items, the minimum value in an array, or a mix, like the minimum value in 3 scalars and 2 arrays) in so few lines.sub min { my $min = shift; foreach (@_) { $_ = $min if $_ < $min; } return $min; }
And that's where my laziness lies.
Another example? Data::Dumper. Enough said.
In Section
Meditations