I like Perl for a variety of reasons.

1. I like Perl's freedom. OOP theory states that you shouldn't violate object encapsulation. But what if I really really want to, just this once? In Perl, I can. And I can also be a disciplinned programmer and demand that everything I do be designed properly with accessors and mutators and whatnot. The point is, if I want to do a quick hack to solve some immediate problem once, I can. Other languages are authoritarian; they have a design philosophy and don't permit you to violate it. Perl lets me choose my own philosophy.

2. I like Perl's expressiveness. The malleable syntax and plethora of operators takes a long time to learn, but once you do, you can do pretty fanstastic things in a very small amount of code. Just look at a Schwartzian Transform.

3. I like Perl's context-sensitivity. Even though it looks much less like English than highly rigid languages like Java or Python, Perl behaves much more like a natural language. Words behave differently depending on what words they're next to, just like in real languages. That makes some things easy and other things hard, but it's definitely a lot more fun. Programming Perl is more like writing a foreign language than simply doing math.

4. I like Perl's people. The features I mention above tends to attract some of the best and brightest programmers around. People who want to delve into the gritty details of a language and explore its every facet, because to do some things you have to. The result is a community that filters out a lot of people who don't have true passion for the art of programming.

In reply to Re: Why like Perl? by friedo
in thread Why like Perl? by Mr. Lee

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