> > "already suffering from a complex of coding in an unreadable language" > > hearsay and conjecture > I was somewhat facetious. But what finished perl was the reputation it earned that it is a write only language. I don't think that reputation it earned is without merit. IMO the early adopters of perl were sysadmins and other non programmers who didn't do a stellar job in writing a highly readable code. To make it worse, perl folks take it as a badge of honor to write their code in most obfuscated manner. They even get some recognition for that.