And I found the parentheses pretty daunting at first too, until I really dug into the language and realized that they aren’t superfluous. They’re there for a reason, and it’s a good one. A lot of them look rather alien if you’re not used to the syntax, but when you consider that they replace both parentheses and curly-braces in C/C++, it’s not nearly as bad as it looks at first. A good editor deals with most of them for you.

The big problem with Perl is that it’s easy to learn, but difficult to learn right. It has a tough learning curve and it can take years to master, even if you already know many other programming languages.

However, I’ve never met a person that uses the advanced features of Perl (closures in an OO context, hash dispatchers, higher-order methods, super general functions, and so on) that didn’t write beautiful, concise, fast, and bug-free code. People that really get Perl (and there are precious few of those because of the learning curve) don’t bash Perl.

The only relative advantage that I see in Python or Ruby is the learning curve. It’s much easier to become a good Ruby or Python programmer than it is to become a good Perl programmer. But aside from that, on a language-feature by language-feature comparison, Perl does almost everything better than those other languages. If everyone that wrote Perl code grokked the language, there wouldn’t even be any readability issues.

As for Lisp… I think it is much better than Perl or pretty much any other language I’ve tried. I can say that even though I am not a good Lisp programmer. Learning a little Lisp made me a much better Perl, C++, C#, and even PHP programmer. When I program in any of those languages now, I see where they try to be a little like Lisp and I feel the pain of having to work around the limitations of the language. Working around limitations always means more work and more time.

Perl is very practical. I know many old C programmers that use it to “get things done quickly”. They get their job done faster than writing it in C, so thats fine for me.

But perl syntax is extremely 1980ish. Perl never bothered to make itself prettier, if you are fine with that – thats cool. But it has got good competition in Ruby and Python, and I can understand everyone who will choose these over perl – the ugliness of the ancient UNIX legacy is the main problem. (Shell scripts are also very ugly, but a perl script quickly gets more complex than a shell script)

When I look at Lisp, or even worse C++, the level of extra verbosity just scares me. (In lisp the needless use of () )

Am I the only one who thinks C++ templates are DAMN ugly? It feels like satisfying a parser …