Dave Cross posted his Perl Recruitment Thoughts, which led to the same tired responses we see every time someone is frustrated enough to bring it up. Again. In the past decade I've written this post about every six months, decided it wasn't worth the shitstorm I'd get for posting it, and let it die. This time, I'll write just the highlights, turn off comments, and let people who care enough rant do it on their own blogs.

First, Dave does quite a bit of work to make new Perl programmers. He teaches accessible and che…

I don't think syntax has much to do with readability. Joel Berger posted his thought on a Perl versus Python matchup, but I think that falls into the same trap that most of these arguments do. If we're stuck at the level of syntax, we're really not very good programmers. I don't think any of us choose a language based on the syntax, but that's all we seem to fight about in the comparisons.

I've had the good fortune to have many excellent programmers, and none of the peopl…