This is inspired by brian d foy's post on "What do you hate most about your language?". Of course I love Perl. I program in it and teach it for a living. Still I hate....
- eval. Block eval should be spelled "try" and should have a "catch" instead of an ugly unreadable if statement following. Block eval should not be called the same thing as string eval - which is very, very different.
- symbolic references. You should have to *turn on* this functionality if you want it, rather than having it on by default. Trying to convince self-taught programmers who refuse to use strict because it breaks their code and don't want to know that hashes are a better solution, is a challenge in self-control every time. In fact, although I hardly ever use strict in my command-line one-liners or my temporary stuff; it shits me that strict isn't on by default.
- bad legacy stuff. In particular things like "reset", which makes some sense in the context of lazy programming, but which just screams out to be abused in "job secure" code.
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inconsistent whitespace rules.
print $foo->{blah}; print $foo -> {blah}; print "$foo -> {blah}"; I get why the last one fails, but why allow the second one to succeed if you can't be consistent?
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no way to take a slice through arrow-notation. If it wasn't for this, we could teach our students arrow notation exclusively and they'd never need to know about the uglier form of dereferencing.
