Al Sweigart wrote:And Perl's...syntax, which tries to make maximal use of cryptic punctuation marks was one of its downfalls...
I've been writing perl scripts for 16 years, and have never used them. You were never REQUIRED to use them. I always found this to be a gross miss-characterization of the language. You can write some extremely cryptic code in ANY language by choosing poor variable names. Granted, Perl has a lot built in to the language, but they are easily ignored and never used.
There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors