Yeah, that was not my point. These aren't but idiosyncrasies of Perl's design, and to model itself on constructs which evolved without direction and which take years to master, just to save a keystroke or two once in a blue moon, is a rather questionable road to take.
Seriously, in what other language don't you ever finish discovering what's on the default namespace, what side-effects any given statement, or hell, expression has, or which syntactic forms are supported, and on and on?
Well, PHP, but we know what the connotations of that are.
And by the way, I'm doing rather 'fine' in Perl, if not for the ever-present worrying about type mismatches (particularly arrays), the frustration of how dirty many operations are (unless you are using a recent version, regex substitution must mutate a variable), the laboriousness of the stock error handling mechanisms (make your own stack trace!) and so on.
'Knowing Perl' is a rather hard thing to do when the list of completely ad-hoc implicit variables and hidden context-sensitive surprises is seemingly endless.
I think mattacular wrote about the run-of-the-mill programming blog that gets submitted to HN. They feel more substantial than one of those spammy "125 free icon sets that'll turn you into a Design god", but they're mostly half-baked regurgitations of Software Engineering folk-wisdom, rehashed from a dozen other blogs which quote some testimony from a famous book.
No code, no maths, no algorithms, no statistics, no nothing.
A well known and tested approach, sum types (tagged unions), would have been way better, but it was cast aside because the designers were apparently unaware of the improvements to union types made since C's inception:
Isn't the ecosystem always trotted out while defending PHP, as well as its 'accessibility' to amateurs? Well, those amateurs are part of the PHP ecosystem, and you'll have to put up with that... or not.
Who said anything about coolness? Seriously, why do people think that just because all languages are Turing complete, any further discussion is just a popularity contest?
Not exactly. You see, you have to define new types from scratch with your approach. With Haskell's approach, you just have to use the Maybe parametric type, which just needs to be defined once. In other words, you just go and use a generic type instead of writing your own, like new List<Integer> instead of new ListInteger in Java.
Seriously, in what other language don't you ever finish discovering what's on the default namespace, what side-effects any given statement, or hell, expression has, or which syntactic forms are supported, and on and on?
Well, PHP, but we know what the connotations of that are.
And by the way, I'm doing rather 'fine' in Perl, if not for the ever-present worrying about type mismatches (particularly arrays), the frustration of how dirty many operations are (unless you are using a recent version, regex substitution must mutate a variable), the laboriousness of the stock error handling mechanisms (make your own stack trace!) and so on.