There’s some truth to it, but it’s mostly that junior developers and senior developers with no discipline that give it a bad name.
The major problem is that it has one of the the highest capacities for writting incredibly dense code there is, paired with very powerful language transformation tooling (i.e. switch statements were added as a module, but can also be used for funny evil.)
Imo the amount of magic variables in perl is too damn high.
Like I don’t want to have to keep all that in my head while parsing through thousands of lines of code. I spent a few years working as a perl developer and even near my last days there I still found myself digging through docs to figure out what certain symbols meant and did.
My first developer role was as a junior developer and I was tossed into single letter variable loop hell in perl lol.
I was telling my mentor that if I were introduced to perl now that I’ve got several years of experience in a variety of different languages and thought models, it probably wouldn’t bother me as much. I kind of like bash (sometimes) and perl is really a hyper extended scripting language so going from bash to perl isn’t too bad. But given that that is what I was started in, I have a massive distaste for it and I doubt that will ever change.
