Yeah, it's true that Perl did not have as a design goal that a complete newcomer should be able to intuitively understand the code without having any prior exposure to the language. There is a little bit of a learning curve, and that was completely expected by Perl's creators. Yes, you have to learn about the idioms above, but they became second-nature. For many of us, the model clicked in our heads and the terseness was worth it. You could express a lot of functionality in very few characters, and if you had invested in learning, it was very quick to grok because common patterns were reduced to familiar abstractions in the language.
And yet, as the industry grew and all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds converged in this space, the tolerance and appetite for funky/terse waned in favor of explicit/verbose/accessible. It's probably for the better in the end, but it did feel a little bit like the mom-and-pop store on the corner that had weird pickled things at the register and a meemaw in the back got replaced by a generic Circle K with a lesser soul.
> And yet, as the industry grew and all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds converged in this space, the tolerance and appetite for funky/terse waned in favor of explicit/verbose/accessible. It's probably for the better in the end, but it did feel a little bit like the mom-and-pop store on the corner that had weird pickled things at the register and a meemaw in the back got replaced by a generic Circle K with a lesser soul.
This is an amazing point that I haven't seen anyone else make about languages in this way.
As someone who got into the industry right after Perl's heyday and never learned or used it but learned programming from some former Perl power users, Perl has a pre-corporate/anarchic/punk feel about it that is completely opposite to something like Golang that feels like it was developed by a corporation, for a corporation. Perl is wacky, but it feels alive (the language itself, if not the community). By contrast, Golang feels dead, soulless.
And yet, as the industry grew and all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds converged in this space, the tolerance and appetite for funky/terse waned in favor of explicit/verbose/accessible. It's probably for the better in the end, but it did feel a little bit like the mom-and-pop store on the corner that had weird pickled things at the register and a meemaw in the back got replaced by a generic Circle K with a lesser soul.