Perl

I first downloaded Perl from Usenet and installed it on a Vax (running 4.3 BSD) back in 1989, and have been using it ever since. I find it to be a very efficient language; that is, I can quickly craft a solution without a lot of cumbersome verbiage. I can get the job done. Quickly.

Critique

Here are some problems I see with the language:

• Deployment: providing a script to a large organization is problematic, largely because of varying versions and differing modules. And many modules need to be compiled for a particular platform.
• Portability: perl is generally good at this, but fails to insulate the programmer from a number of platform vagaries, like getting the login name, host name
• PERL5LIB: for some reason I see this being used (because a vendor supplied perl needs it) but then other perls get broken because of incompatible libraries.