That's a laugh. I'm trying to pick up some C and C++ (in order to use Inline :-) ) and I follow the discussions in the newsgroups. Most of the questions about data structures are how to make a "hash"(linked-list), so Perl is critisized for making it easy and fast?

Most of the criticism I see about Perl from those newsgroups, is that the syntax is "odd". They don't like the $, @, and % notations, but that is the easiest way to solve the problem.

Whenever I see Perl hashes criticized like that, I usually just silently think, "this poor fool dosn't realize what he is missing, but it's best not to aggravate him, they tend to fly off into rants about how smart they are". :-)