I think that this goes down to the very foundations of perl. Larry Wall invented this language because he had an itch to scratch: composing reports with sed and awk and whatnot was a tedious thing to do, writing report generating tools in C no better. So he invented a tool which "did what he wanted" eliminating boring aspects of C (e.g. malloc() and free(() and such) and, by embracing them, surpassing the limits of sed and awk. Good job, in the perl definition of a good job.

Things made easy can be made more easy by providing "reasonable defaults", on a per-platform basis, which leads to the concept "DWIM" - Do What I Mean - and which opens programming to the non-programmer.

I'd say that there are 10 classes of perl people:

• computer cracks / scientists which love perl for what it is
• casual or non-programmers which by doing perl gain expertise

The cracks are polite for what perl is, and because perl demands that polite attitude. The others are humbly polite because they know where they come from. Or not.

So, except "Or not", we (sorry folks, I just claim that for you) we are per retty open-minded (sometimes with a hole in the head instead), open for other things, but lazy...duh. wrote too much already.