At the beginning the author says his experience is based in 1997 -- which triggered a bit of a WTF response from me. If the language hadn't been updated in that

At the beginning the author says his experience is based in 1997 -- which triggered a bit of a WTF response from me. If the language hadn't been updated in that time the "review" might make sense, but as your details point out it's woefully out of date. But really, in the realm of scripting languages 14 years is a huge amount of time. Why would anyone judge Perl, Python, or Lua, say, by the state of those languages in 1997. The mind boggles.