Douglas McIlroy writes: Perl was nice in its early years as it was much more capable than awk. I understood its original intent to be a better glue language. While I find the syntax to be ugly, that's not where I hit a Wall. To me, the thing that makes Perl a bad language is the magic side effects left in things like _0 from many operations. This is stuff that one is not likely to remember unless it's used every day. I think that it's why so many consider Perl to be write-only; too many magic implicit things instead of being explicit. I understand that compactness was a big deal 40 years ago but no longer.