Perl is 25 years old today
Before i switched to Python as my general purpose language, i used to be a bit of a Perl fanatic.<p>I've still to come across a language that lets you get your ideas down as quickly. It's full of fantastic time savers, e.g. the for(<>) construct and the format output functionality cover a bunch of common use cases in minimal keystrokes (let me pipe in some data, analyse it, then spit it out in a clean report).<p>It can hurt readability but for small one offs, it often doesn't matter.