peeve no. 258 is dynlang users who disrespect Perl

Before I get my rant on, I'll do the lawyerly thing and attempt to clarify my terms to avert misunderstanding.

1. "dynlang" is 9 characters shorter than "dynamic language", the name of a fuzzy category of programming languages that allow, support, and exploit the capability to make run-time changes to a program's very structure--its data types, classes/data structures, method/function dispatch. Although program interpretation is quite better suited than compilation to implement such a capability, it's too simplistic to assume that all dynamic languages are necessarily interpreted and all static languages are necessarily compiled, and for that matter too simplistic to assume that a particular language implementation never does both. (Groovy cheerleaders are fond of mentioning that their dynamic language is compiled, while compiled Objective-C code sends object messages at run-time.)
   
2. "Disrespect" refers to an attitude, not to an engineering-like objective evaluation of trade-offs. An example of the latter is "Java's static typing nature can result in code that is difficult to adapt to unanticipated purposes." An example of disrespect is "Java sucks. And one of the reasons it sucks, and the people who choose to use it also suck, is that the stupid types strewn throughout a class do nothing but get in the way when I just want to pass in an instance of MyTempObject, and get the idiotic compiler to stop tying my hands on my behalf". (By the way, I apologize for the inaccuracy. This example of Java disrespect is a bit too lucid and courteous to match the corresponding real statements elsewhere on the Web.)
   

Disrespect is not the same as disagreement. I'll be frank: I realize Perl's syntax and semantics are a jumble of accretions, some of which are helpful more than not and some of which are harmful more than not. Quick, what values are false in Boolean context? What does the '...' operator do in scalar context? Which __special attribute__ do you use to define accessors and mutators (oops, that's Python)? Whenever I've written Perl, I've mentally chosen one of two "write modes": messy mode or neat mode. Messy mode, such as using the Perl monkey command line 'perl -ape', is good for processing one-time text files, but not much else. Neat mode should weight the concerns of readability and development speed differently than messy mode because programs that are used regularly spend much more time undergoing future maintenance than initial development. Neat Perl is choosy about what features to use. I agree that Perl code is frightening in wrong or reckless hands, i.e. in the grip of someone who only has messy mode. However, it's laughably naive to place most of the blame on the dollar signs and slashes...it's in the same league as being too distracted by the parentheses of Lisp-family languages to notice the self-referential power of expressing both functions and data structures as lists.

So I know that Perl has its problems. In fact, my encounters with Perl nowadays stem from two sources: 1) ad-hoc administrative tasks and/or data processing (but if I need to interact with one or more of standard formats, databases, JVM APIs then I switch to groovy), 2) upkeep of legacy Perl that acts either as "glue" between systems or as rough internal CGI interfaces for simple yet vital business tasks (I'd also note that the "legacy" Perl has no firm date for replacement). I'm not bothered when language cheerleaders call attention to Perl's weaknesses; this practice is hardly a new phenomenon, and when the latest critic repeats the same years-old tired refrain I can barely manage to react at all. No, what gets me worked up is when someone is dismissive, contemptuous, or mocking toward Perl, which has on numerous occasions, despite its acknowledged icky portions, served my purposes, enabled me to achieve unconventional solutions, and taught me intermediate-to-advanced programming concepts. Without Perl, I might have had to hack together a comparatively ugly combination of grep, find, sed, awk, etc., and shell script. (At the time I'm describing, pretty much the only other programming language available on the system was C or C++, and later Java.)

I'm not too irked by cheerleaders for static languages who throw rocks at Perl for fun. Their derisiveness is a subset of their general antipathy for dynamic languages. If Perl was the epitome of language design perfection then they would still pronounce it junk because of characteristics that by definition apply to any dynamic language: performance overhead, lack of mandatory type enforcement, multiple inheritance, chaotic data structures that are modifiable at will, and so on.

As the title says, the true irritants are dynamic language users who explicitly or implicitly assert that Perl is horrible, terrible. These users know the advantages (and disadvantages) of a dynamic language. They know Perl is a dynamic language. They know that they would probably rather use Perl rather than a static language to solve the same problems (okay, maybe some of them would instead use ML-family, Haskell, or statically-compiled Lisp-family--just maybe). Moreover, the reasons they give for why Perl is abominable sometimes strongly resemble the reasons static language cheerleaders give for avoiding dynamic languages altogether: too many operators and punctuation in general, syntax features that can interact in complicated ways, too few built-in data types (no "official" numbers or strings, just scalars!), the choice to use or ignore OO, special variables that affect execution, accumulated design cruft that makes some tasks too awkward or tricky. The stranger cases are dynamic language users who formerly used Perl primarily, but after changing their habits suddenly stop recognizing anything valuable about Perl at all. Perhaps they used Perl for the general benefits of a dynamic language, all the while having strong distaste for the actual "Perl-ness", and as soon as they could obtain a dynamic language without that flavor they were glad to kick it to the curb. Or (shudder) perhaps some current dynamic language users spent a long time solely in the static language camp, where they grew accustomed to decrying Perl as a mysterious, confounding mess, but after using and liking a dynamic language they continued to denounce Perl more out of habit than out of scorn for dynamism anymore.

Perl is what it is (except when it purposely breaks compatibility in some ways for Perl 6), though it does keep changing and code written using current recommended practices is superior to what you might remember. All I wish is for dynamic language users to give Perl the credit it's earned, is still earning, will earn. Stop mercilessly bashing it as if it ate your parents. But know that I join you in disliking sigils, list/scalar context distinctions, and autovivification.