In threads like: I noticed that even more people than I would have expected came to Perl either directly or indirectly through the web, but especially by means of CGI scripting.

Now this brings us to the matter of script kiddies: on the one hand it is obvious that they contributed much to make Perl popular. On the other one they contributed to give it an extremely bad name.

As far as I'm concerned I came to Perl relatively late (5.6.1) and I've never been influenced by bad programming habits made common by script kiddies and the like. So the question, especially aimed at more experienced users that "were there" when thing was still growing up, is wether retrospectively they judge the phenomenon to have had a positive or a negative influence on Perl culture, diffusion, etc.

I'm very curious about this topic... there's a somewhat loose parallel with software piracy which a priori one would imagine to be disruptive of commercial software companies, but which in fact determined the success of some of them.

In reply to Script kiddies and the like: beneficial or disadvantageous? by blazar

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