in reply to When you first encountered Perl, which feature amazed you the most?

♫♪ (slow reggae) ♫♪♫

When I was just a kid
Someone told me if you will
Try to start coding in Perl
I've tried and I'm pleased still
I said it lingers deep within my soul

♫♪♫..

As stated elsewhere when the last millennium was ending I wrote some HTML tags and I looked at the results on some extinct browser. Then, almost immediately, I started coding in Perl to automate some system task on a small BugsLab's network.

I was fascinated by sigils :) and everything looked like magic (and it is).

But probably what amazed me more was Perl's error reporting system: it was always pointing clearly to my errors so that my errors became easy to fix. I used diagnostics a lot. My english was terrible and self.. teached ;) it means everything was really clear.

The above about error reporting is still true: I love it. So yes DWIM and help me doing it correctly too.

During the decades it happened to me to glance at other languages briefly (Python and PowerShell for example) and the third time they spitted out a flow of unreadable lines of errors I quitted. I'm really patient

Another impressing thing was The community but I'd add The Culture ..here you are!

L*

There are no rules, there are no thumbs..
Reinvent the wheel, then learn The Wheel; may be one day you reinvent one of THE WHEELS.