Developer Suggests Perl is to Programming what Yiddish is to Spoken Language
We stumbled onto an interesting opinion piece on the Internet the other day from a web developer named Yoz Grahame. He suggests that Perl is Internet Yiddish. He sites several similarities between the two languages, in spite of their vastly different uses.
Ultimately, Yiddish and Perl share the potentially detractive qualities of complexity and inconsistency, but turn them in their favour due to the huge amount of character they provide. This is because they have History. This has resulted in Culture and Community, and a great degree of affection.
The most interesting aspect of the article is the association that Grahame makes between regional Yiddish dialects and the time-honored Perl concept of TMTOWTDI.