Mostly the latter. In the rare occasions when I wrote Perl, the language offered all I needed to make my script as boring as Java, along with many temptations

Mostly the latter. In the rare occasions when I wrote Perl, the language offered all I needed to make my script as boring as Java, along with many temptations to be clever and concise; many people use Perl because it supports write-only "quackery", but it's their choice.