Routinely I see in numerous online discussions that people refuse to even consider Perl 6 because they hate Perl. Or there are younger people who think of Perl as "their grandfather's language" (in much the same way people in my generation view COBOL).I am not a fan of Perl, but this feels tragic to me. Perl was so radically different. I remember being on Perlmonks way back in the day, and someone would post a question about why their code didn't work, and there would be dozens of people who could instantly, intuitively post a corrected version of the code, but then the poster would say "oh, shit, what was my code doing? and why does the correct code do something different?" and you'd be lucky if there was a single person (cough chromatic) who could explain it. And none of the Perl fans cared, because Perl made them extremely powerful and productive, and they could (almost always) confidently produce a line of Perl code that did what they wanted. The analogy to natural language carried further into practice than Larry Wall could have dreamed. Nobody worries that the difficulty of resolving linguistic conundrums impairs their ability to have a conversation, and the Perl ninjas in my company enjoyed a very close and chatty relationship with the systems they worked on.
I'm the opposite kind of person, who got sick to his stomach looking at a line of code like !#$foo->%_[] (note: not real Perl) not knowing why it worked, even if I wrote it and knew that it would work. Even now, I have a nagging fear that if I executed "!#$foo->%_[] (note: not real Perl)" it would print "Yes it is! Ha ha. Love, Larry" to the console. I can't stand that, so Perl was never for me, but I still hope that against all odds this long, drawn-out apparent deathbed scene turns out to be the middle of a successful convalescence.