Hi, Alex,
That is a great writeup and really enjoyed reading it. For background, I am not a professional developer and just program as a hobby. As such, I am free to choose whatever language suits my fancy. It's funny because when I first started on this journey, I swore I would never touch Perl as it was the most inscrutable and impenetrable language I encountered. But I recently decided to give it a try and have to say I have been pleasantly surprised. In addition to what initially drew me to it a few weeks ago, I've come to appreciate a few more things about the language, none of which are new to the stalwarts who ply the halls of the Monastery:
- Similar syntax to Bash, awk, grep, sed and other tools you commonly use on the command line. While not exactly identical, I like that they share a common structure which makes it easier to move between them.
- All (of my) problems have already been solved! Because Perl has been around for so long, virtually any problem I can think of has been addressed and written about multiple times, in places such as here, Stack Overflow or in a multitude of books. You can save a lot of time by not reinventing the wheel as chances are, someone has already laid the groundwork for you. And I'm not just talking about the large number of modules available in CPAN either.
- Friendly community. As someone who is not a professional developer, I know I will get stuck on problems. The Perl community here and elsewhere has been beyond generous in helping me get past these issues. For me personally, this factor probably outweighs whateve technical merits a language brings because if I can't get help to leverage a language's strengths, I'm not going to get very far.
The one downside for me is the TIMTOWTDI philosophy of Perl. I know that many advocates espouse this a a good thing but I sometimes wish there was just one idiomatic way to do something. I routinely struggle with the paradox of choice in many aspects of my life and this is one area where I wish I wouldn't suffer the same fate. But otherwise, I am really enjoying Perl. I've even managed to amass 13 stars in this year's Advent of Code competition with what little spare time I have this time of year. And I have to say, I'm really enjoying it!
Gratias tibi ago
Leudwinus
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