Perl is more of a hacking language, which probably explains why its community is so giving.

What do you mean by "Perl is more of a hacking language?" Before you answer, I understand that you are using the term hacker in its original sense. Even so, I think it's hard to claim that one language is more of a "hacking language" than another.

I think the reason the community is so giving is because its original contributor and primary benefactor, Larry Wall gave us Perl, our reason for existing together as a community. He set an example. I do agree, however, that he certainly wasn't the first to do so. The hacker culture which fostered Perl¹ is indeed rooted in these principles. I also agree that the term "gift society" applies to a wide range of overlapping communities of which ours is only one.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

I knew I'd get a question about this, but for some reason I said it anyway. :-)

I can't claim to know lots of programming languages, or that I am fluent in the ones I know (~5 or 6). But, I find perl has a certain ability to flow; it has a feel to it.

I've tried other scripting languages. Python doesn't have the expressibility and doesn't always seem consistently built. Ruby's nice, but doesn't have all the power. Lisp dialects can be useful, but I couldn't see myself writing a large application in one of them.

Compiled languages just aren't the same. I find that they too can lack expressibility. Not to mention some of the more low level things you can get tripped up in. And no eval?

I guess it's the fact that you can do pretty much anything in perl, even if you should't necessarily. It has advanced features that let you do cool stuff. Backtracking through the regex world, for example. Or maybe obfu's, like Camel Code.

Granted, perl has its quirks. Some things are unreasonably hard, but that's changing.

elusion : http://matt.diephouse.com