Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible --- Larry Wall
Perlの設計思想。
- ある言語は、ある種の用事を簡単に済ませられる。しかし他の用事をほとんど不可能にする。
- 別の言語は、どんな用事を済ますのも均等に難しくする。
- Perlは、簡単な用事を簡単に済まし、かつ難しい用事も不可能にならないように設計された。
Programming Perl, 2nd Edition (1996), by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen and Randal Schwartz. Its preface starts with:
Perl is a language for getting your job done. Of course, if your job is programming, you can get your job done with any “complete” computer language, theoretically speaking. But we know from experience that computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy. At one extreme, the so-called “fourth generation languages” make it easy to do some things, but nearly impossible to do other things. At the other extreme, certain well known, “industrial-strength” languages make it equally difficult to do almost everything. Perl is different. In a nutshell, Perl is designed to make the easy jobs easy, without making the hard jobs impossible. What is the origin of the phrase ‘make the easy things easy, and the hard things possible?’ - Quora