Nico Hailey
ndh@cats
bad-language-Perl

  Perl, with its seductive features (text processing),
leads one down the garden path of madness.  It is unreadable in
the extreme. In the best case it looks like punctuation has
been vomited forth upon the screen by a brain-damaged monkey.
In the worst case it looks like modem line noise.

  Opaque built-in variable names combine with infernal dynamic
scoping to allow just about anything to be syntactically
legal. This cavalier attitude builds vast superstructures
within which bugs can hide and breed. References in Perl are
particularly loathsome: &{ $dispatch{$index} } (1, 2, 3);
This snippet is offered as an example from Programming Perl,
2nd edition. "dispatch" is an associative array of function
references, which is dereferenced and applied to the trailing
values. This example, obvious to the most casual observer, 
uses far too many non-alphanumerics to be friendly to an actual
human coder or reader.

  Like the mosquito, even Perl has its place in the world of
programming languages. That place is short shell scripts,
preferably under 100 lines. It is useful as a glue language due
to the fact that modules are available for just about anything,
from port-scanning to parsing Latin. However, when code reaches
a certain level of complexity, the structure provided by the
more carefully planned languages is appreciated.

  Our punits assignment was a perfect pedagogical tool for
illustrating the key points of the previous paragraph. Perl
showed itself to be excellent for text processing of the
units file, with good regular expression support. But,
for the recursive decent part of the program, it was a
data-structure nightmare. The other part of the Perl problem
is Perl programmers.  For the most part, these people exist to
shoehorn Perl "solutions" to problems which would have a more
cogent solution in an appropriate language. While a language
culture may be out of the scope of a programming languages
class, the irritating traits of the Perl community are worth
discussing because Perl has no fixed standard. This results
in Perl people constantly generating fresh horrors which
distill into yet less readable code.