Question

What? Perl Beautiful? Elegant? He must be joking!

It’s true, there’s some ugly Perl out there. And by some, I mean lots. We’ve all seen it.

Well duh, it’s symbol soup. Isn’t it?

Yes there are symbols. Just like ‘math’ has ‘symbols’. It’s just that we programmers are more familiar with the standard mathematical symbols. We grew to accept the symbols from our mother languages, whether that be ASM, C, or Pascal. Perl just decided to have a few more.

Well, I think we should get rid of all the unnecessary symbols. Makes the code look better.

The language for doing so already exists. It’s called Lisp. (and soon, perl 6.)

Okay, smart guy. Truth is, I can already invent my own symbols. They’re called functions and methods. Besides, we don’t want to reinvent APL.

Oh, fake alter ego, you are so funny! It’s really true, Perl can be quite beautiful. It can be quite ugly, as well. With Perl, TIMTOWTDI.

So, what are your favorite elegant bits of Perl code?

Answer 1

Perl facilitates the use of lists/hashes to implement named parameters, which I consider very elegant and a tremendous aid to self-documenting code.

my $result = $obj->method(     flux_capacitance       => 23,     general_state          => 'confusion',     attitude_flags         => ATTITUDE_PLEASANT | ATTITUDE_HELPFUL, );