To be honest the parent comment to yours first link reminds me of a rather lot of shell/perl created by people that treat things with the procedural mindset and

To be honest the parent comment to yours first link reminds me of a rather lot of shell/perl created by people that treat things with the procedural mindset and just keep bashing their heads against a problem until it succeeds. To my mind, that's a success for Perl: it allows people who wouldn't otherwise be able to write programs to do so. Sure, they make messes--who doesn't at first?--but they get things done.