"Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in." - Larry Wall
Considering the general appearance of code for the language he created I'm not sure this quote of his can be taken all that seriously. At worst Perl looks like somebody glued the shift key down and repeatedly head-butted the top row of their keyboard.
(I assume you'll insist that any link I give is ugly. :-) But note that the declarations and parameter specifications are at least as elegant as any other major scripting language I'm aware of.)
Edit: And for the record, I love Perl and Lisp. :-)
Not trolled, probably karma 18 because I've posted only a few times in the years since creating an account. I'm really not intrested in karma/scoring games on sites like HN.
Moose looks really nice and I've nothing against Perl - my language of choice is Scala. I just thought it was a daft thing for Larry to say considering the issues of readability that have been levelled at Perl.
If you consider this, what you've just said is "I think it's daft for Larry not to like the way lisp looks considering some people don't like the way perl looks."
I don't like the way python looks. Does that mean it would be daft for Guido to ever criticise another language's aesthetics? :)
Considering the general appearance of code for the language he created I'm not sure this quote of his can be taken all that seriously. At worst Perl looks like somebody glued the shift key down and repeatedly head-butted the top row of their keyboard.