Let's start out with an honest examination of the author's valid points:
- Perl is Unix distilled. Things like fork instead of threading, the IPC model, lots of functions, and a strong command-line, text-processing-filter heritage do come from its Unix background. On the plus side, learning Perl is a good way to pick up a lot of useful Unix constructs.
- Many functions are tied to their C counterparts. Just try to do any socket programming or file locking without man pages handy. Granted, there are modules to make this easier, but they still require at least passing familiarity with the C library.
- Dereferencing gets messy with multi-level structures. Using temporary variables helps here, and it's nice that you can drop the -> for multilevel structures, but wrapping layers of context braces around things gets old.
And where the author is wrong:
Update: I snipped a snipe at Python. It was unfair. If you're really curious, frag quotes part of it below.
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