QOTD

nminusone may appreciate this, judging from the twitching that ensued when I forced him to look at some perl code. From the Tour de Babel, found via a link from Coding Horror:

There are "better" languages than Perl — hell, there are lots of them, if you define "better" as "not being insane". Lisp, Smalltalk, Python, gosh, I could probably name 20 or 30 languages that are "better" than Perl, inasmuch as they don't look like that Sperm Whale that exploded in the streets of Taiwan over the summer. Whale guts everywhere, covering cars, motorcycles, pedestrians. That's Perl. It's charming, really.

But Perl has many, many things going for it that, until recently, no other language had, and they compensated for its exo-intestinal qualities. You can make all sorts of useful things out of exploded whale, including perfume. It's quite useful. And so is Perl.

The author seems to like Ruby, which I suppose I might as well look at one of these days in the interests of keeping my brain from rusting. Someone on That List[tm] has been singing its praises for years, but it's not been high up on my priority list to spend any time on it.