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Perl is the canonical example of "less is sometimes better".

I love coding in Perl. But it seems that everyone uses a disjoined subset of it, which makes collaboration awkward.

And, if C let you shoot yourself in the foot, C++ give you a shotgun to do so.. Perl gives you a timed nuclear device.




Perl (without dependencies) works awesomely well as a replacement for bash in scripts, in my experience. Unlike Python, chances that it will break the next month (or the next decade) are virtually nil.


Python without dependencies will also work everywhere basically forever. Hell, most Python 2 is valid Python 3, but it's been over a decade now - Python 3 is the default system Python in most everything.


“Most” is a highly load bearing item here.

You can’t go back and rewrite the scripts that don’t work so they do.




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