I used it quite a bit, and wrote some applications in it that are still in use a decade later. The "write-only" aspect of Perl is real -- it enables many styles

I used it quite a bit, and wrote some applications in it that are still in use a decade later. The "write-only" aspect of Perl is real -- it enables many styles and idioms, and as a result, tends to requires reading knowledge of all of them. It also has some unusual design decisions (list vs. scalar context) and some hacks ("bless") that do not contribute to readability, especially for people who do not get to use Perl all day long. Python is a lot more readable, and does most of the same stuff. What Perl did that was amazing was bring regular expressions "to the masses", and Perl-compatible regular expressions (pcre) are still the defacto standard that most subsequent libraries have used (more or less). "The internet" is an abstraction and doesn't hate (or love) anything. That itself is the kind of gross generalization you are criticizing. And one can criticize a language and still have respect for it.