I always found the Perl "community" to be really off-putting with all the monk and wizard nonsense. Then there was the whole one-liner thing that was all about being clever and obscure. Everything about Python came off as being much more serious and normal for a young nerd who wasn't a theater kid.

I'm having to pick up some perl now, and while I don't interact with the community, it surely _feels_ like it was written by wizards, for wizards. Obscure, non-intuitive oneliners, syntax that feels like it was intentionally written to be complicated, and a few other things that feel impossible to understand without reading the docs. (Before everyone jumps on me - yes, as a developer, I should be able to read documentation. And I did. But until I did so, what the code was doing was completely opaque to me. That feels like bad language design.)

Some of it I recognize as being an artefact of the time, when conciseness really mattered. But it's still obnoxious in 2025.

The whole thing reminds me of D&D, which is full of classes & spells that only exist in modern D&D because of One Guy who happened to be at the table with Gygax, who really wanted to be a wuxia guy he saw in a movie, or because he really wanted a spell to be applicable for that one night at the table, and now it's hard-coded into the game.

Perl made a mistake, the language was invested in depth of expression and that, in a programming language, just leads to a 1000 ways to write same thing where like... 2 of them are actually nice to read.

Pyton was ("was" was used here on purpose) the opposite, the whole "one way to do a thing" and insisting on more clean code even if more verbose.

You could write nice looking Perl code but you had to choose to do it, while Python pushed you in that direction from the start.

As much as I dislike using whitespace as flow control it also does make sure the code is always indented reasonably even if it is a newbie just starting in the language.

It didn't help that Perl, just like other languages after (PHP, JS, Python too), had a "curse of the newbie language", with many people starting with it (as at the time it was kinda only sensible choice for webpages before mod_php did a revolution in how most webpages are hosted), with no training and just winging it, which in language that puts no limits on what user can do and no guidance on what they should do... leads to that ugly one liners and line noise as a code scripts.

I don’t know about the wider Perl community, but I listened to some interviews from Larry Wall and he just came across as a nerdy guy having fun with what he’s doing. I quite liked listening to him.

The syntax problems are just surface. There are some real problems underneath:

Poor performance of the single implementation.

A single implementation.

Leaky ref counted GC, but 'luckily' the syntax for references is so clunky that nobody does anything complicated enough that it really matters.

Bolted on object oriented features that never got the love they needed at a time when oo languages were sweeping the world.

Most of the wizards decamping to a new language (Perl6) that was 'developed' for years without an actual implementation to keep them grounded.

This made me smile given Python's love of Monty Python references - the cheese shop etc.

I actually think it works when you are in the ecosystem fulltime for a good while.

But having to interact with it once in a while is always a hurdle. The same with bash. Do I use [ or [[? Where does the semi-colon go? if then fi, but while do done (and not elihw). -eq or =? Functions have () but no parameters.

I'm sure those things make sense when all you write is Bash / Perl, but it's daunting.

Now, Python can get pretty far out there too with Meta-programming, and JavaScript can get confusing with prototyping. And Ruby (especially RoR) takes the crown, where they resolve variables at the moment the line executes. Makes debugging blocks really hard.

The less magic in code the better.

I never interacted with any of that, to me Perl was always "Bash with text processing built-in and no string interpolation pitfalls". I reach for it when I need to write one to two page long utility scripts. Python is too willing to deprecate features (plus the whole 2 to 3 fiasco burned me badly), so I only use it for things I know I will maintain. Perl is for writing a shell script that will run unchanged in perpetuity.

Perl is a sysadmin language. There's "always" been this tension between sysadmins and developers.

In my mind (developer back then) I'd amateur-psychoanalyze all of that nonsense as some kind of inferiority complex meant to preserve the self image. Needless complexity can be a feature!

And now we are all developers!