Yoz Grahame, one of the excellent geeks I met in London last week, has posted a sure-to-be-classic essay, “Perl is Internet Yiddish.” Like Yiddish, perl has no one canonical way to express any one idea, and like Yiddish, perl can be lyrical or it can be pidgin.
Let’s talk a bit more about the make-up of Yiddish: it’s mainly German, that much is obvious, but the vocab is heavily twisted and most of the grammatical rules have been abandoned. There’s quite a bit of classical Hebrew and English in there too, probably some Russian, Slovak and Polish as well. It’s where it came from. And now, where Yiddish has ended up, it has given back: chutzpah, shlep, refusenik, nosh, etc. – all essential Yinglish.
As I said, the dialects vary heavily from region to region. My father’s mother says “nit” instead of “nisht”, something that has my mother recoiling in disgust. Still, either works. You can chop and change as much as you like, throw bits of your native language in when it works, etc. Sure, people do this with other second languages, but in this case it’s a core philosophy of the language.
In other words: There’s More Than One Way To Do It. Or, as Perl hackers often say, TMTOWDI.
(Thanks, Yoz!)