Comment Re:There's nothing wrong with Perl ... (Score 1) 283
I disagree - Perl's biggest issue is that things which should be defined in the language's grammar are instead defined in code. This reduces it to a language of special cases.
Consider the following:
$_ = foo 1;
bar;
print;
Does the function bar, in the absence of an argument, use $_ as its argument?
Some functions do, some don't, and this is true even among the core functions. This is because the implementer of the function must explicitly read from the global $_, rather than the language passing the argument to it. The resulting inconsistency can make it difficult to reason about what a Perl script is actually doing.
There are other issues, such as variables inside functions being global by default, but that's the big one.