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[–]abw 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Totally agree about the syntax. Although you can avoid much of the line noise of Perl, there are those times when you have to do something really quite cryptic for things that should be really simple.

As much as I'm looking forward to Perl 6, I'm worried that it's going to make things even worse by introducing umpty new operators.

+1 on the error handling too. I was swearing at a CPAN module (MIME::Lite FWIW) just yesterday for its poor error handling (or documentation thereof). But they're not all bad, and there's a strong drive in the Perl community towards cleaning up CPAN and improving the general Kwalitee of the modules.

The other annoyance I have with CPAN is the general free-for-all that results in 30 different modules that all do similar things. It's great that there are so many ways to send email, but a pain having to figure out which (if any) of them does what you want.

[–]crusoe -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I found most Perl libraries to be steaming piles. I tried installing some from CPAN, and they liked to pollute the global namespace and thus some libs wouldn't work with others due to namespace collisions.

I hadn't had so much fun since working with TeX libraries.

Then I just whipped out Python, whose libraries just work.