My research involves scanning job lists for companies asking for help with Perl and drilling down into the company information to identify the nature of their need. Special attention is given to companies that indicate that they are switching away from Perl to another language. At that point I try and contact developers 'in the know' for what problems they experienced with Perl and perhaps get a reason for the change.

What I am finding is that developers inherit the codebase from others that have left the position. They claim to try and learn the language and run into roadblocks. No one thus far has claimed that the sigils was too hard for them to understand. What I am hearing is a lot about classes.

I didn't mean sigils as such but the whole duality of arrays and array_refs and the resulting grammatical overhead.

For instance:

If $arr was always an alias of \@arr and vice versa, you'd still have sigils but way less headache.

> What I am hearing is a lot about classes

I can imagine that, because Perl has a zoo of OO models.

But I think most people already get frustrated at dereferencing before reaching OO.

YMMV

Anyway, I'd love to have one of those mission "impossible" legacy projects, just to prove what a real expert can achieve by cleaning it up.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
see Wikisyntax for the Monastery}