...I agree mostly with your points.

I would have to quibble with the premise that "the 99% likelihood is that he was an idiot." I'd say that there is a very high probability that this was a consultant who learned Perl on his own and didn't benefit from the sort of peer community that can be found here. I'd say that there's a high liklihood that the code is actually difficult to understand. (Although we've seen no direct evidence of this.) But I'd stop well short of presuming that someone else is an idiot without something a little more concrete.

I am 100% with you (on the other hand) behind the principles that a successful program communicates to other programmers as well as to the machine that it controls. And I agree wholeheartedly that readable code is usually more error-free and robust, not to mention extensible and maintainable.

But I am certain that I've seen the "second consultant" effect in many shops where the new guy proclaims the previous guy's work to be crap and insists that it all has to be thrown out. And I've seen it happen for slim reasons, dogmatic reasons, or simple ego reasons.

And I have earned my chops on this. I've encountered, and successfully worked with, code that was probably criminally negligent. And you may hate it, but if you're a good engineer, you try to make it work anyway. That was the point I was trying to make. Sometimes you just have to take what you've got and go with that.

...All the world looks like -well- all the world, when your hammer is Perl.
---v