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I stopped reading at the word "art".

And then I started reading again. Larry took it in a different direction that I presumed and it's certainly an interesting claim to make.

I'm just not really sure if I buy it... It sounds to me like dropping someone in a Home Depot surrounded by various tools and materials and saying "Go ahead build a dog house anyway you like." "Art!"

I greatly enjoy the creativity involved in programming and I can appreciate the aspects that set Perl apart from other languages at its inception. But I get a lot more satisfaction out of simplicity and elegance in my language than the ability to put a condition on either side or whether scalars, arrays, and hashes have unique identifiers in the variable name.

Maybe I got into it at the wrong time, but Perl has never felt like art to me...



A Perl script can almost morph into its own unique language, one that exists only during the runtime of that script and then flashes out of existence like a Boltzmann brain.

To me, there's no disputing that writing Perl is like making art. The problem I have is deciding whether this is even a remotely good design decision for production code.


Have you seen Perl poetry?



Let people call it art, if that is what keeps them developing and maintaining it.




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