A rant on Perl

In case you're wondering why I haven't posted anything the last 24 hours: I've been up to my neck in the stupidest, most brain dead, drug addled technical BS ever created: Perl. Please quit reading unless you want to read a technical rant from an irate Cajun...

You were warned. Okay. Here we go: What kinda fuckin' drugs was Larry Wall smokin' when he designed Perl's reference system? And what kinda drugs was he fuckin' smokin when he designed Perl's object system? And man, you put the two together, we're talking fucked, fucked, fucked!

Look, I'm not trying to do anything fancy. I'm just trying to store an array into a hash reference that gets blessed as an object, then later retrieve the array. Simple enough in Python or Ruby or Java. But in Perl? Noooo! Perl's rules for dereferencing appear to be even more arcane and ridiculous than those of "C" (I went to the book store and checked a dozen "C" books on how to create an array of pointers to functions that return an int, and one -- ONE -- got it right out of all those books. Even the experts get confused!). What is literally TWO WORDS in Ruby "return self.stuff" -- is all sorts of arcane incantations in Perl, indeed, the only way I've managed to make it work is to store a *reference* to an array into the hash and then retrieve the reference and dereference it later...

I am just SOOO glad that the next project is going to be written in Ruby on Rails... I'm thinking of holding a seance where we burn Perl books or somethin'. This penguin's flippers will be flappin' fer joy then!

-- Badtux the Perl-hating Penguin