Seibel: Do you like Perl or is it just handy?
Zawinski: Oh, I despise it. It’s a horrible language. But it is installed
absolutely everywhere. Any computer you sit down on, you’re never
going to have to talk someone through installing Perl to run your
script. Perl is there already. That’s really the one and only thing that
recommends it.
It has an OK collection of libraries. There’s often a library for doing
the thing you want. And often it doesn’t work very well, but at least
there’s something. The experience of writing something in Java and
then trying to figure out—I myself have trouble installing Java on my
computer—it’s horrible. I think Perl is a despicable language. If you use
little enough of it, you can make it kind of look like C—or I guess
more like JavaScript than like C. Its syntax is crazy, if you use it. Its
data structures are a mess. There’s not a lot good about it.