I disagree totally with the author’s p.o.v, Once you understand Perl’s syntax, all become absolutely limpid. (unless you live in darkness

Flynn, Perl monger from time to time.

my @sorted = sort { $b->{priority} $a->{priority} } @unsorted;

For the last couple of days, I’ve been reading a small free e-book called “Learning Perl the hard way”. On page 32, the author Allen B. Downey has this little gem: “Perl enthusiasts like to point out that “There’s more than one way to do it,” which they abbreviate TMTOWTDI. Perl detractors sometimes come back with FORHOTDW, which stands for, “For obscure reasons, half of them don’t work.”

Since I started programming back in the Eighties, I’ve always tried to write code that I can come back to six months later and understand what it does. It’s no harder to do that in Perl than in any other language, but it requires that you’re actively concious about it to a larger degree than eg. Python. (Regarding the latter, my brain is totally incompatible with the OO paradigm, so the finer points of Python are regrettably lost on me.) Usually, you can write Perl in something resembling classic C-style, and that’s what I do. Whenever I need some of the more arcane stuff that I have to look up in the Camel book or in the Cookbook, I’ll make a comment on it.

I’m a regular reader of your blog through Planet Larry, and have even included a link in my blogroll. I have to say that this is one of your best articles ever.