I'm actually starting to program in Perl...
I stumbled across a funny blog entry that kind of sums my first impressions:
The first problem I had were the variable sigils: $ @ %... what the hell were those? Why do they need to jumble up my source code? They don't add to readability? Line noise... line noise! And, why the hell is it @array but its $array[1]? And... and... what the hell is:
@a=(foo,bar,baz,quux,psqs,mind);
%b=@a;
print $b{baz}; # prints "quux"
print @b{@a}; # prints "barquuxmind"
An @-thingy is constructed and then assigned to a %-thingy, and then you use a $-thingy in front of what once was a %-thingy with {baz} after it and that prints out the element in the original array that came right after baz, quux,... buuuuuut, if you use two @-thingies, one inside the curly braces and one that just happens to have been assigned into the %-thingy in the first place, i.e. @b{@a}, it prints every other element from the original @a?!?! This is maddening! Why would anyone, *anyone*, in their right mind use this slightly-less-terse-brainfuck of a language??
Here's the complete post:
http://www.alpha-geek.com/2004/09/08/perl
I'm still learning it, I like regular expressions in perl, although I sometimes get confused when I see regex without quotes... yet it's a giant leap from PHP where you need to write 5 lines and spend 15 minutes of debugging and scratching your head to make sure that the right submatches are going into the right arrays, and even then you'll still have doubts.
There are a lot of other bright aspects... like the speed, and the incredibly huge variety of modules... I thought you could do a lot with PHP, but wait until you see Perl... :)
Anyway anyone else here knows perl?