I'd say you posted a bit too much of it. The long string of insults at the end does nothing to support the point raised in the beginning, and probably upset people.

It's a fair criticism to say that perl culture encourages code that is tricky, sneaky, or magical in some way, and that tendency has consequences on how people view perl and perl programmers. It's quite a touchy issue though, as you can see whenever someone suggests that writing simpler code would make for easier maintenance and then gets attacked by people saying that there's no point in toning down code for people who don't know perl well enough.

I'm not sure the author here chose a very good example. This one looks like someone who didn't know about fancier things like IPC::Open2, not someone trying to be tricky. He's right about combining statements with "and" though.

In reply to Re: Thread on Joel on software forum : "I hate Perl programmers." by perrin
in thread Thread on Joel on software forum : "I hate Perl programmers." by techcode

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.