he [Matt Wright] also did a great deal of damage to its [Perl's] reputation

I should probably explain what I mean by contentious statements like that.

For a significant proportion of people (especially those who aren't career programmers) their first exposure to Perl is seeing one of Matt's scripts. Matt has said that when he wrote the scripts he was just learning to program. Therefore the code in the scripts is often over-complex and difficult to understand. I think this makes a significant contribution to Perl's reputation as a "write-only" language. This isn't helped by the number of people who seem to equate popularity with quality and assume that Matt's scripts are good examples of well-written Perl.

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg