Earlier quoted context omitted.
...and, in fact, that's also what you'd get if you taught everyone how to program Python in high school instead of Excel. You'd get tens of millions of non-interoperable messes of programs (which still get the job done!). That's exactly what happened with Perl when everyone learned to use, modify, and develop CGI scripts in the early days of web-based application development. Dynamically-generated website content wor…
I personally think that a lot of notoriety from Perl stemmed from insane overuse of regular expressions. I'm not talking simple and concise expressions doing ordinary useful things, but rather insanely long and intricate ones which one had to be at a god-expert-level on regex just to attempt to understand. These kinds of expressions are what ultimately caused the derisive terming of Perl as "line noise". It was reall…
The problem was that Perl's performance on builtins(sorting and regular expressions in particular) was stunningly good while its performance on anything else was stunningly bad.
The idea that you would Decorate-Sort-Undecorate an enormous array because the overhead of passing a function to sort() was so much slower was ridiculous.
In the case of regexes, breaking apart the regex into readable chunks and processing the data multiple times was so much slower that everybody piled everything into the regex. Named captures didn't appear until 2007.