I've thought of Perl for a long time like the PL/I or Ada of the dynamic, getting things done languages. Useful, but huge. I forget the exact quote and I can't find it to get it perfect or to credit someone. I don't even remember which language it was originally about, but I'm thinking it was PL/I. It goes something like "It's a number of complete programming languages each struggling to get free".

That reminds me of this Bjarne Stroustrup quote:

Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out.

Yes indeed - we call that smaller, cleaner language, "C". :-p

I just happened upon this quotation from ken the other day which nicely sums up his feelings about C++:

[C++] certainly has its good points. But by and large I think it's a bad language. It does a lot of things half well and it’s just a garbage heap of ideas that are mutually exclusive. Everybody I know, whether it’s personal or corporate, selects a subset and these subsets are different. So it’s not a good language to transport an algorithm—to say, "I wrote it; here, take it." It’s way too big, way too complex. And it’s obviously built by a committee. Stroustrup campaigned for years and years and years, way beyond any sort of technical contributions he made to the language, to get it adopted and used. And he sort of ran all the standards committees with a whip and a chair. And he said "no" to no one. He put every feature in that language that ever existed. It wasn't cleanly designed—it was just the union of everything that came along. And I think it suffered drastically from that.

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🦛

I'm fairly sure the quote I was thinking of was a play on that quote.