Shock and Terror - Perl IS a readable language

As a fresh developer, one of the first things you'll hear about Perl is one of the following:

1. Perl is unreadable
2. Perl is the only language that looks the same before and after is encrypted with sha256
3. Larry Wall fell asleep with his head on his keyboard and when he woke up he called the result Perl

You won't hear that Perl is the language that was behind almost every Web page until 2000s, practically powering the whole www, or that you can use Perl to build anything and elegantly implement all of your business requirements, or that Perl is the only real programming language that is delivered with every Linux distribution. No, I'm sure that if you started programming in the last 5 years, the very first thing you heard about Perl is one of the above bullshit jokes. And, if you happen to challenge their affirmation, they'll pull out some snippets that won a Perl golf code competition to "prove" it to you, proudly enforcing their statement with: "that is a perfectly valid  piece of Perl code". The truth is that no, the output of a golf code competition is not a valid piece of code. Not for the business critical applications that we generally use Perl for. Believing someone who never opened a Perl manual and says that Perl is unreadable, is like believing a 3 years old when she tells you that English is unreadable. Come on, you gotta be smarter than that.Show me a programming language that you can understand without reading some parts of its documentation and I'll give you the winning numbers at the lottery.I'm sure you can read and understand any programming language after you put enough effort and exercise into learning it - yes, even brainfuck. 

Programming Languages are Like Spoken Ones

There are around 1 billion people who understand Chinese and 200 million people who understand Arabic after all. And there are literally billions of people on earth who can't understand a single letter from the Latin alphabet. Do you believe that those billions of people who can't read English are wrong? or the ones who only speak Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, or Hebrew are using a less than best language because you can't understand them?  Now, do you really think that Perl is unreadable? Compared to what? To a language you used for years before trying to do something with Perl? Who sets the programming language readability standards? You see my friend, There Is More Than One Way To Do It and if someone tells you something else, send them to this post.
Just because some respected developer in an unrelated technology can't figure out what each sigil means in Perl, it doesn't mean that the language is unreadable. It means that the developer is a superficial cunt individual, who can't figure the difference between a joke and reality.

Programming Languages are Like Civilizations

We can consider Perl to be like the modern world, where everybody is allowed to do anything they want as long as they don't disturb or harm other people (this is unfortunately untrue at a world scale, but I live in Europe and here this is pretty much the case). Perl evolved nicely from a time similar to Egyptians where we used rudimentary tools and were able to  build great things - the internet, just like the Egyptians built the pyramids, to the present day, where we have DBIx::Class, and Mojolicious, and Catalyst, and Dancer, and Plack and we build beautiful skyscrapers with hundreds of floors.

We can see that other languages are still in the dark middle ages, where they burn witches when they say that not everybody likes to have their indentation enforced on their code the Earth is not flat, or even that it revolves around the Sun instead of the reversal.

The future is now

Right now I'm in Brussels, waiting for +FOSDEM 2015 to begin (thanks Evozon for sponsoring my presence here). If you're also around, do your best to attend Larry Wall's keynote speaking on Sunday, because I've heard he has really important news to share regarding Perl6. You might actually not have that much time to try Perl6 (which I hope will be named Camelia) before it is declared production ready and becomes mainstream.
If he made it that big with the original Perl, imagine what kind of a language will come out after his more than 25 years of experience, out of which, 14 were spent on designing a new language.

I can't wait to see the power of Perl6 explained by +Curtis Poe (who's one of my favorite presenters) on Saturday - have a sneak peak at his slides hereIf you liked this article, don't forget to share it on your favorite social network.

Share this article: