De Gustibus

In the late 1990s I used Perl a lot, but then I discovered other languages that suited my tastes and needs better, particularily Tcl.

Today I was searching for something and Google served me a page from perlmonks where a question about Tcl/Tk vs Perl/Tk was asked. The OP commented on the "horrible ugliness" of Tcl, and someone posted a Perl/Tk snippet as some kind of example of sensible Perl code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use Tk;

my $mw = MainWindow->new;

$mw->Button(-text => 'First Button',
            -command => sub { print "You hit the First Button.\n" }
            )->pack;

$mw->Button(-text => 'Second Button',
            -command => \&second_sub,
            )->pack;

$mw->Button(-text => 'QUIT',
            -command => \&exit,
            )->pack;

MainLoop;

sub second_sub
{
    print "The Second Button invokes a Named Subroutine.\n";
    return;
}

For comparison, here's the equivalent Tcl code:

pack [button .b1 -text "First Button" \
    -command { puts "You hit the First Button" }]
pack [button .b2 -text "Second Button" -command secondProc]
pack [button .b3 -text "QUIT" -command exit]

proc secondProc {} {
    puts "The Second Button invokes a Named Subroutine"
}

It is a strange thing that some people find the almost sublime clarity, conciseness, and (yes, I would say:) beauty of Tcl "horribly ugly" while accepting the labyrinthine and bizarre syntax of Perl as usable.