Like so many others, I learned Perl when shell scripting didn't quite cut it any more. By the time I found myself doing cuts, awks, temp files, merges and for loops, making some disgustingly hackery shell stuff... one day I needed to do an array transformation, and found Perl and fell in love.

Over my journey, I have found - and written - some utterly disgusting hackery. Perl is very good at it, which is part of why it gets a bad reputation. Have a look at some of the Perl obfuscated programming for example - at first glance, you might be hard pressed figuring out why this is genius and not junk.

Perl lets you get away with 'just get on with it' coding. It's good for that, because it doesn't punish you with inscrutable error messages and 'just not working'. This too can lead to some pretty atrocious messes of bad code as well though.

I think that's just the way it is - the ethos of Perl is that it's really easy to get started. It's a 'do what I mean' sort of language. To someone who has worked with a very strict language, that looks rather lazy and sloppy.

Personally, I like that flexibility. Having moved beyond 'bodge it until it works' programming, I think I can now choose to write code in a way that best expresses what I meant the code to do.

So I think the reason for the bad rep is as simple as it being an accessible language, with a lot of legacy code snippets, that lead to a lot of ugly bodge jobs. And because it's not compiled code, the ugly bodges are visible to anyone who looks. But none of these things mean it's a bad language.