Why is there so much “magic” in Perl?

Question

Looking through the perlsub and perlop manpages I\'ve noticed that there are many references to \"magic\" and \"magical\" there (just search any of them for \"magic\"). I wonder

Answer 1

Perl's design philosophy is that simple things must be simple. This sounds good,and to some extent it is. However, there's a tradeoff involved: Making every simple thing a one-liner results in tons of special case hacks to save a few lines of code. Different people have different preferences regarding making simple operations within a language simple versus making the language specification simple. Perl is at one extreme. Java is at the other, at least among languages that people actually use. Python and C# are somewhere in between.