mark++

I just realized that one of the reasons I choose Perl for “quick hacks” is because the syntax is so ugly and inconsistent.

It’s a psychological thing. If I were to select Ruby, for example, I’d feel a tremendous obligation to write a beautiful well-designed program. I’d probably create a subversion repository, create unit tests, automate, etc. These are all important things, but I want to amortize their up front cost over the term of a long project.

I choose Perl because it takes the pressure off.