Why apeiron Thinks Perl5 Sucks

Jump to bottom Edit New page

apeiron edited this page Jan 17, 2013 · 3 revisions

This is a list of things in perl5 that suck in my opinion. Others may disagree. That's fine.

subroutine prototypes
exceptions
dump
study
formats
tie/untie
AUTOLOAD
package stashes
having to dereference stuff, ever
no modern OO in core
XS
eleventy billion ways to build perl modules
No method overloading
Limited operator overloading, and no way to create new ones (afaik)
Poor debugger support partly due to hairiness of perl itself
given/when is still far too clever
We need block comments. No, seriously
No lexical subs
CORE:: and things in it being special and not overridable
No simple REPL that ships with the language
Soft references
Needing a 1; at the end of every damn module
The inability to easily write things that compile / parse perl
The API isn't comprehensible to mortals
IO layers
We shouldn't need local::lib to install stuff to a user's homedir
common::sense