Following an article by osfameron (found thanks to Planet Perl Iron Man) I landed on the interesting analysis performed by Aldo Cortesi. I was quite unsurprised at seeing yet another variant of the old thorny “Perl is dead or at least does not feel very well” infamous adage.
I was a bit more surprised at seeing this comment (this comment does not seem to appear any more now):
At the risk of inflaming more Perl programmers to come and manfully defend their language on my blog, I think there’s a reason why Python has a nice BNF grammar, and Perl has 5600 lines of ad-hoc parsing code: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=663393
I wonder which reason Aldo is thinking about. IMHO, the reason is that probably Python development focuses more on language orthogonality and Perl development more on programmers’ ease at the possible expense of a more complicated compiler, but it’s just me.