A lot of best practices for Perl are good programming practices in general. Of course there are (plenty) of exceptions, but that's the case with other languages as well. One thing one wants to avoid is to program Python in Haskell or Pascal in C, for example.
As for hard to read (for a beginner) have a look at Haskell, for example.
Python's fame is that it "reads like pseudocode". That's nice, but utterly fails if a programmer has no good feel for algorithms. Pascal used to have the same fame. A few years back I had to reimplement a Pascal program into Perl. One of the pieces of code was 100+ lines. After some studying it turned out to be a variant of bubble sort. At the end few lines reversed the sort order (!). It could be replaced with a few lines of Perl. And no, not because I write short and cryptic code. The code could've been written way shorter in Pascal as well, even when implementing a sort manually.
Those things are happening or planned except for the version number change.
Tweaks to make complex data structures less of a nightmare: http://search.cpan.org/dist/pe...
better integrate the object model: https://github.com/stevan/p5-m...
Same here. I am a freelance Perl programmer and for the past 12+ months have been very busy with coding in
A number of people who left Perl and declared it dead are the ones that couldn't program in Perl to begin with (never learnt the language, thought it could be learned by trial and error), and most likely still can't in whatever they consider fashionable right now.
Make sure your code does nothing gracefully.
