@foolishowl Perl really fit the bill for people used to Unix... it combines a lot of stuff from sh, sed, awk, etc. If you aren't used to Unix, that has to be incredibly alien tho. And I think there was a BASIC effect or ASP effect... a shitton of people learn to program in Perl (then PHP) during the dot-com boom where anyone could make money with no prior experience, and that created a flood of extremely poorly thought out, buggy, awkward code. Ironically Java for a time was the super serious ivory tower language that only super serious senior level programmers programmed in, so CompSci classes started all using it and teaching it, then four or five years later, the market was flooded with inexperienced programmers who wrote poorly thought out, badly structured, buggy Java, until there was terrible Java everywhere. I think any programming language that becomes essentially "the learning language" suffers a pendulum swing like that. But I think it was worse with Perl... a lot of Perl programmers were incredibly arrogant, maybe not unlike some Linux hackers. I leaned in to that for a while. That arrogance keeps you from seeing yourself honestly. There was an incredible contrast for me tho between Java shops having a spirit of collaboration and mentoring and Perl shops being dog-eat-dog and every person for themselves. This is a social problem, but Java having a type system helped a lot... it at least discouraged changing code and breaking everyone else's code. It didn't prevent it of course but type signatures helped create a norm. Wanting to see more collaboration in Perl, I created a typing system and did some talks, but never got any buy-in. In the later years, a lot of people talked about how it's possible to write good Perl with good docs, and a lot of people started doing. But otoh I had/have a coworker who goes hard on doing the opposite, documenting nothing except ultra terse commit messages, and belittling anyone who asks any questions about what he did or why he did it that way etc. I think that shit is what really gave Perl the bad rep.