| What does make Perl so enjoyable to those people ?
If you ask this question to N people, you will get N answers (protip: this applies to most things).
| There isn't even arguments to functions
Not true. It's just packaged differently.
Like others have pointed out, more modern languages like Python and Ruby got to learn from Perl's design and "mistakes"
Compared to other languages, Perl is old (aka 'mature' aka 'crusty' depending on your attitude).
What that translates to is:
Supports many methodologies. You can just script or you can build a complex OO package.
Many, many packages. Python and Javascript may have an explosion of new packages, but they're all playing catch-up with Perl
Ubiquity. It's on and runs nearly every machine.
Sure the language has warts, it's as old as I am!
I'd highly recommend the book "Learning Pearl". It really gives a solid introduction to the language. Granted Perl is pretty unreadable at first, but so is {C, Objective-C, Haskel} until you learn {C, Objective-C, Haskel}.
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interesting that it counts distributions, rather than modules... 35,933 vs 194,343, which would have it put on par with Java. I hate statistics and numbers, they somewhat tend to tell you a lie all the time
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| What does make Perl so enjoyable to those people ?
If you ask this question to N people, you will get N answers (protip: this applies to most things).
| There isn't even arguments to functions
Not true. It's just packaged differently.
Like others have pointed out, more modern languages like Python and Ruby got to learn from Perl's design and "mistakes"
Compared to other languages, Perl is old (aka 'mature' aka 'crusty' depending on your attitude).
What that translates to is:
Sure the language has warts, it's as old as I am!
I'd highly recommend the book "Learning Pearl". It really gives a solid introduction to the language. Granted Perl is pretty unreadable at first, but so is {C, Objective-C, Haskel} until you learn {C, Objective-C, Haskel}.
Quick note on "many, many packages": by what metric are you gauging this?
Also, my favorite Perl book is the "Perl Cookbook" - definitely not for learning from scratch, however.
modulecounts.com/
interesting that it counts distributions, rather than modules... 35,933 vs 194,343, which would have it put on par with Java. I hate statistics and numbers, they somewhat tend to tell you a lie all the time