I suspect one of the following:

1. No one introduced him to CPAN, CGI, MIME::Lite, or other nifty little joys.
2. He never had PM to smack his little fingers.
3. he's a known troll.
4. he tried to use Agent M's favorite module      ...and (surprisingly) got shot down.
5. all of the above.

--f

Update: Fixed the tpyo that lemming so graciously pointed out. Thanks.

F. He's a Python programmer.

I generally ignore stuff like this. It reminds me of much of literary criticism these days... it's pompous, it feels no need to cite examples, and prefers condescension to outright rudeness. If this were a criticism of Lisp in favor of Perl, it would be just as poor.

This post did contain a few redeeming ironies, though. Take this statement out of context:

to really destroy any useful concepts of how software is supposed to work for instance, the best possible way is to ridicule...

If the author intended this, he's quite a wit... since, being devoid of anything concrete, his whole post amounts to little more than ridicule. You cannot disprove anything he says; nor can you prove it. So what is it? It's an expression of taste, backed by rhetoric. To the extent that it pretends to be anything else, it's intellectually dishonest, too. To call this a religious argument slanders religion... religious arguments are supposed to deal with faith.

The other entertaining part, which I've abridged somewhat, is this:

a person's behavior is shaped by the rewards and the punishment he has received ... the signals that other people send them, so this is a powerful mechanism for programming the unthinking masses ... if you're very good at it, you can create a new world for them in which all of this makes sense

Perhaps this was the author's aim in writing this post. :-)

One can write bad code in any language.
In some ways, Perl has an advantage in that you can identify immediatly what type of programmer they are.

Now that I've read the rant:
He obviously has only made a cursory examination of Perl.
He was biased from the start.
Maybe he had a bad experience with a Perl programmer or code?

1. Strive to write better code every day
2. Strive to teach others to write better code every day

I found this sub-rant illuminating:

"perl makes a whole lot of tasks easy to do, but if you look closely, you will see that those tasks are fundamentally braindamaged, and should never have been initiated. "

Bovine Scatology

I find two beauties in Perl. The first is the richness of the contributory community, the willingness to share and mutual support.

The second is that is gets past uncontrollable constraints. Your work often has to be a part of a greater whole - so munging is a virtue not a vice. Often the tactical and ad hoc beats the strategic, but delayed solution. Does the need last longer than the mean time to code? Perl is a combination flashlight, saw, hammer and crazy glue package that runs rings around many other tools.

Stop.

Well I guess Eric only likes to do what others say is possible in ways that the 'industry' says is correct. I don't think we'd want to count on Eric to come up with a fix in a crises, or be the hero of some connectivity issue.

Eric wants things to be neatly organized like himself and to damn anything that's beyond his skill. (Especially if it opens doors for creativity and imagination.) Eric probably has nightmares about JAPH's.

Somebody please tell eric to Capitolize the P in Perl