Looks like he doesn't do that these days, and the reason appears to be that the Perl community have, oddly enough, failed to lash at him for his opinions.

Well, maybe the Perl community is so used to people with no clue having random opinions about the language that it stopped caring. (Or maybe it has better things to do.)

Complaining that Perl code is line noise and unmaintainable is as retarded as complaining about Python's whitespace or the many parens in Lisp code. These things are simply not relevant issues.

So eventually you either flip the bozo bit on those people, or you just can't be arsed.

/J

flip the bozo bit on those people

++; may that idiom flourish and be applied to all who write more whitepapers than usable code.

I'm also not offended by the word script. The way I see it, as Perl people, we have two alternatives when it comes to language advocacy, one is to explain to everyone that using a "scripting language" means using a general usage, Turing complete, full featured language that can do any and all of the things other languages can, but because of its nature gives one a more expressive, more productive, more natural, flowing and powerful way of expressing himself in a way that allows for him to achieve more, sooner, or, to stop saying scripts and start calling it "programs".
Being a lazy bum that I am, I vote the second.

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Stop saying 'script'. Stop saying 'line-noise'.
We have nothing to lose but our metaphors.

I also know that Firefox's been gaining a lot of good PR since they decided to name FF 1.8 "Firefox 2", and FF 1.9 "Firefox 3".

You may be thinking of Gecko, not Firefox -- and did that trick work for Sun with either Solaris or Java?

Looks like he doesn't do that these days, and the reason appears to be that the Perl community have, oddly enough, failed to lash at him for his opinions.

That's about the size of things. I tucked this comment away that came up in a thread on reddit. (Which in turn I probably learnt about from a thread from Perlmonks in the first place):

"As I've done for a great many other programming languages, I've bashed on Perl's technical weaknesses at length in the past. To my continued amazement, the Perl folks are the only ones who never get upset. They just say "Haha, yeah, boy, you're right, it sure is ugly. Heh. Yeah, so, um, anyway, I'm going to get back to work now..." It's awesome. I've gained so much respect for them. It's almost enough to make me go back to programming in Perl."