After further review, I see you're entirely correct. After reading a lot of the comments, I'd forgotten that the original article was actually sympathetic; and the title is somewhat ironic. But it sure dug up a lot of Perl resentment.

However, I think it is very valuable to listen (or read) critics, for a number of reasons, mainly to find out what bothers people, what misconceptions are out there, and what should maybe be improved.

Here's some not-necessarily representative samples:

• "That's because PERL, even good PERL, looks like an explosion at the punctuation factory compared to a vast majority of other languages."
• "What is worng with you Perl programmers? Does the thought of a newline or indentation, possibly even whitespace fill you with fear and horror?"
• "...nearly all of the perl code I've seen has been virtually indecipherable to anybody not a perl veteran."
• "Slashdot is written in Perl. Whenever a business is mentioned on slashdot, their website goes down. Ergo, Perl is bad for business."

To be fair, there are lots of good pro-Perl comments posted (at least now) too. Maybe the good news is that 950 people thought it was worth commenting on.