Just wanted to comment on the "many respected hackers" thinking that golf and obfuscation has hurt perl. Whenever I see this argument, I find it is used as a copout. Every language has obfuscation games. No programmer worth paying attention to seriously believes a golf game is how you write production code. You can write garbled code in any language; perl just happens to provide a variety of tricks to do it. Blazar, I know you know that, confused why you cited it.