There is empirical evidence that Perl is an inherently maintainable language. The Software Productivity Research group have published 2 comprehensive surveys of programmer productivity across different languages and problem domains. One was published in 1996, the other in 2006. The results in both are consistent - for overall perl productivity scores & when perl is compared against other popular languages.

Function points were used as the data collection method and the survey covered the whole dev lifecycle. The actual…

I like dispatch tables. Which means I use this kind of thing quite a bit:

$dispatch{$pieces_of_state}->(@args)

if exists $dispatch{$pieces_of_state};

Does that sub-routine call look ugly? I suspect it does. It would look nicer in javascript for sure:

dispatch[pieces_of_state](args)
vs
$dispatch{$pieces_of_state}->(@args)

But how much difference does the syntax really make? I understand the impulse to make perl look more like Haskell but I doubt very much that the extra noise from the sigils ma…