Perl

I am not sure there is a language hated with a passion by more people than Perl. It seems to me that it is almost fashionable to hate Perl. Well, why, it is ugly. It is impossible to maintain. It has no abstraction mechanism. It has no data structures. It is not object-oriented. And so on.

Well, I like Perl. I have been using Perl for 15 years, and I am not about not to use Perl. In fact, I probably use Perl more these two years than before.

What is the reason I like Perl? Well, first, I am not a point-and-click person. I would rather write a script to automate a task I have to do repeatedly than to go through all the clickings over and over again. Second, many of these tasks are rather similar, but not similar enough that the same script can be re-used frequently. In other words, cut-and-paste is actually the best re-use strategy for these tasks. Third, input-output seems to be an afterthought for a lot of languages. Perl handles I/O much better than these languages. I can keep listing more and more reasons why I like Perl. All these reasons boil down to one thing: Perl is very useful to write a lot of small to medium tasks.

Now, don't I think Perl is ugly? Well, I used SNOBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC (without real subroutines), etc., before: Perl is not particularly ugly in its syntax. I would venture to say that an unstructured Perl program is more or less as ugly as a FORTRAN program with no indentation and heaven forbids, no whitespaces.

Of course, you can hate Perl all you like. If you actually know enough about Perl, I will respect your opinion. If not, oh well, sometimes, we all like to hate things we don't know much, don't we?