They one they named "baby cart" is something I have used to interpolate expressions into a string. Eg

    print "The sum is @{[1+2+3]}";

produces

    The sum is 6

instead of having to do:

    my $sum = 1+2+3;
    print "The sum is $sum";

fun thing about this page: i have gemini in the browser and when I asked it 'why is the entire Wall Family naming these things?' it said it couldn't engage. Turns out 'goatse' is a forbidden word to Gemini.

Perl was the first language I learned on my own after graduating university many years ago. I fell in love with it because of quirks like these and because code written in it can have a poetic quality you don't see often.

Now I am old and joyless and I want the code I write for work to be boring and unsurprising.

But sometimes one can still want to write poetry.

OMG! The Goatsie operator =( )= is WILD! wilder than the glob wild operator *

After first experiences with linux shell scripting, sed, awk, and C in 1990s, I found perl a welcome refuge. Way more featureful than DOS .bat files or BASIC! Its capabilities (perl + cpan) have always well exceeded my need for CS goodness. People do complain about the syntax, oddly, without mentioning the numerous ways perl was designed to make common tasks easy to do. The "use strict" pragma, and early adoption of testing culture are two examples where perl led the programming community. With the continued maturing of the language and ecosystem, I can only smile at the naysayers and wish them happiness whatever the language.