>- there can be spooky 'action at a distance' effects.
Yeah, those are unique to Perl... :-)
>- not everyone has read the best practices book
True, it is unique that Perl has programmers which doesn't follow the coding standards of the group... :-)
>- Chasing up and down inheritance chains can be very unpleasant.
True, it is only Perl which have over complex OO libs. :-)
>> For another example, using unicode in a regex somewhere can cause files to be pulled from disk, suddenly slowing your app by three orders of magnitude.
I don't know much about Unicode. You mean that using Unicode characters would require loading a library? Can you give a reference to that "three orders of magnitude"?! If you count the startup time of the lib as run time, I am disappointed.
>- there is poor IDE support for perl
Huh? Afaik that IDE from Activestate gets good reviews, but Perl programmers use Emacs (or Vim) anyway. Than we have Padre on the way.
>- sigils make it difficult to scan code
>- it can be very hard to figure out what arguments are being passed, or what arguments a subroutine or method expects.
(More or less the same point.)
At least partly correct, I guess. I generally check the synopsis, first. Their existence probably comes from this.
>- it's common to pass around a hashref (a.k.a. magic blob of data) ...
Yeah, those are unique to Perl... :-)
>- not everyone has read the best practices book
True, it is unique that Perl has programmers which doesn't follow the coding standards of the group... :-)
>- Chasing up and down inheritance chains can be very unpleasant.
True, it is only Perl which have over complex OO libs. :-)
>> For another example, using unicode in a regex somewhere can cause files to be pulled from disk, suddenly slowing your app by three orders of magnitude.
I don't know much about Unicode. You mean that using Unicode characters would require loading a library? Can you give a reference to that "three orders of magnitude"?! If you count the startup time of the lib as run time, I am disappointed.
>- there is poor IDE support for perl
Huh? Afaik that IDE from Activestate gets good reviews, but Perl programmers use Emacs (or Vim) anyway. Than we have Padre on the way.
>- sigils make it difficult to scan code
>- it can be very hard to figure out what arguments are being passed, or what arguments a subroutine or method expects.
(More or less the same point.)
At least partly correct, I guess. I generally check the synopsis, first. Their existence probably comes from this.
>- it's common to pass around a hashref (a.k.a. magic blob of data) ...
Create an object, if it is complex.
Edit: Moved answers to strange claims to top.