Sometimes Perl gets a bit of a bad rap for being a language in which it is trivially simple to write utterly unmaintainable code.

Today Slashdot even reviewed a book, Perl Medic, aimed at helping people to demystify the inner workings of their colleagues’ incomprehensible apparent line noise, posing as a supposedly high-level language.

I personally think Perl’s a great tool for getting the simple things done simply, and getting even the most complex of tasks done without too much in the way of hassle. Whatever you want to do, there is almost certainly a module freely available on CPAN to help you in doing so.

And yes, I generally make sure that my code uses both the strict and warnings pragmas, and try to use sane variable and sub naming schemes in anything more than a couple of lines long.

But it’s still always a bonus to be able to use such a behemoth of mind-bleedingly insane code as the gorgeous Mail::RFC822::Address module, as I did today. Yes, there are perhaps more reasonable ways to verify the integrity of a supplied email address, but I’m afraid I just rather like the idea of passing my input through this.