Perl you say? Unfortunately I learned the standard CLI text tools, then Python, before I ever looked at Perl seriously. But I’m jealous of folks who are fluent in that language. Maybe I’ll circle back to it at a later time. I’ve had to debug and fix code written by others using Perl, but can’t at this moment produce anything really usable.
I love pointers, and the whole idea of passing references rather than data used in real-time systems. They have a place, and forced immutability (such as in Go, for example), while I get the arguments, is a little annoying. For assembly, I’ve played with programming an arduino “blink” program using embedded ‘asm’ in c++. I like the raw control of pulling all the levers of the machine, and I’m a fan of this dude here, who created a tutorial series on designing a breadboard computer using a First Principles approach, and have been enjoying the NAND-to-Tetris content.
And I’m sometimes with you on the whole whitespace thing, especially when jumping in and out of different remote systems that don’t always treat white space or line endings consistently. The Python interpreter’s pre-parser is usually pretty specific though about where you have sinned, which tends to make it more of a minor annoyance as long as indentation style has been mostly consistent throughout a module. It’s just hard to compete with the ease and speed of writing web-based APIs with Python. Most frameworks make it so that you just define your function logic, then add a decorator to specify its route, what connection type and requests it takes, then boom. API is done.
So if you haven’t done so, I’d love to see yours and anybody else’s fugly code. I’m language agnostic at the end of the day. It’s the ideas behind the code that matter to me, not the specific language used to do it. Not sharing, having all the work, time, and energy just expire without a meaningful trace, is depressing to me… and I suspect due to the anti-social nature of geniuses, it probably happens too frequently. I assert the world is worse off for it too.