I spent year developing CMS in Perl in 1999 (HTA application with ActivePerl. wonder if anybody else did something like this). It traumatized me, and first thing that I did in my next job is to learn python and develop some core systems in it. Few of my friends moved from perl to python as well.

I still remember spending time with my coworkers on bench outside of building trying to figure out #@$%$^&$%@something = []sd[dsd]@$#!&lala lines written by previous developers

Yesterday I used `pwgen` to role a random password, and at first glance I legit thought it might've been working Perl code. I'm not even slightly kidding.

Before I eventually switched to PHP, I ended up writing multiple CMS-like solutions that would run via `cgi-bin` but write contents to the webroot (what we would now call a static site generator). As I was quite limited with the standard shared hosting at the time, I ended up inventing my own single file database format (it was a simple text file) to keep state. It worked quite beautifully and kept me afloat for the first few years of my life as a web developer around the early 2000s.

I was aware of ActivePerl and quite liked Komodo. Thankfully I could keep myself from doing things on Windows/IIS apart from a brief stint writing a single file CMS in ASP.

Perl heads are downvoting you but I agree as a longtime ex Perl user that the sigils were noisy nonsense.

The original intent was you could see var types with them - $scalar, @array, %hash.

They immediately broke this by deciding the sigil would apply to the value /extracted/ from the data structure. So you declared array @foo but accessed an element as $foo[1]. What? There’s a logic there but already you’re violating many people’s expectations so why even have them. The sigils are now confusing many people instead of clarifying anything.

The sigil idea then /completely/ failed when they introduced references and “complex data structures” (nesting arrays within arrays like every other language - in Perl this was a special thing because they had been flattening lists by default so no way to put one inside another).

So now to get at a hash in a hash you used not % but $ since a reference is a scalar. $hash1->$hash2->{“key”}. Versus $hash3{“key”} for a simple hash. Just awful noisy syntax. Due to poor language design up front.