I clearly second this. Fortran made use of indentation as syntactic/semantic information representation. I have been told it is a mess.

As for the essay itself: Itīs a nice subsumption of some views on the reasons for a language becoming popular. It is worth a read even for those that evidently donīt like Lisp (like me). Iīm really into programming since 1987. Have done so before, but rational programing for 14 years now. Why did perl become my popular language?

The answer is simple: 95% because its features match my needs best, and 5% because I saw cool people practicing perl. It was really a shock 1995, when I (used to some "my lang is better than your lang"), after converting from C to C++ (feeling itīs mightier but not the right thing) saw how perl-hackers looked at all this "which lang is the best" with a ENORMOUS amount of peace and humor which only could mean that they had found something.

Then I was told to do a project I wanted to do in C in perl...
I didnīt like this command but obeyed. About one week later I was happy like a kid in a toy shop for having the possibility to work with such a great lang.

If only there was a good Prolog<->Perl interface. (hint hint) :-)

Ciao