[yekim]

Wrt Perl being readable / legible; I think most find Perl hard to read because there are 3-4 different ways to do the same thing. And many of the more "advanced" ways of doing things rely on short, terse single characters that act essentially like magic and behave differently in different situations. At least this is what I remember as I climbed the Perl ladder.

Contrast this with say, Python, where readability is highly valued and they have a one-way-to-do-certain things mentality, like sorts for example, means code is generally easier to grok, debug, and extend.

Thus, readability becomes especially important when you have to deal with someone else's big ball o' mud and you need to fix a high stress, high visibility, lines down issue at one in the morning because the original programmer is long gone, didn't leave any comments in their code, and decided to play "look at me, I'm so clever with how I use this operator", but forgot to account for a certain scenario that manufacturing decided to roll out the other day without telling anyone. Can I get an amen?

[ergothus]

I won't disagree with most of what you said (though I will say that having one way to do it does NOT mean that said one way is particularly readable/maintainble - looking at you, Java).

That said, for every time I've hated that someone got terse and clever, I've loved that I wrote something that _read_ well, particularly when returning to previous code I don't remember. Coding is like a language, you can use that expressiveness to be terse, to be rambling, or to be clear. Learning to do so is a skill that has to be learned (cost), but can be more expressive (benefit). Languages (or patterns) that restrict that reduce the cost, and reduce the benefit.

Consider, for example, that Python takes great pride in it's explicit readability, and yet it chose "lambda" as a keyword (making no one happy outside of higher math), that "def" was chosen instead of "define", and that one of the most powerful parts of the language (comprehensions) are highly prone to using secret knowledge. [] works differently than (), for example.

So, what you've described are all valid reasons that Perl has a bad rep...but I don't blame Perl for them anymore than I blame JS for the hideousness that is the DOM, or Python for the bad scripts that have been written in it. Regardless of the language, cleverness and/or terseness without regard to future people (including your future self) is just not a good practice.

[mavelikara]

  though I will say that having one way to do it does NOT mean that 
  said one way is particularly readable/maintainble - looking at you, 
  Java
  ..
  So, what you've described are all valid reasons that 
  Perl has a bad rep...but I don't blame Perl for them 
  anymore than I blame JS for the hideousness that is the 
  DOM, or Python for the bad scripts that have been written 
  in it.

Will you be willing to extend the same charity to the bad Java code you have seen? Or do you have specific complaints for your harsh comments singling out Java?