> I wonder how he "programmed" in any of those other languages he kept suggesting.

Oh he never did ... he only read about them. :)

Perl has a bad reputation and idiots like spreading the word.

> I suspect the same way

Most coders do (don't ask about the JS code I've seen so far)!

And if people google for Perl they'll find plenty outdated content from the 90s - simply because Perl is much longer popular and gave birth to the internet.

(BTW similar problem for Emacs which is 40 years old now !)

Ruby raised to stardom with Rails, compare the pretty webpages with the monastery and guess the appeal for this kind of IT-lers.

I bet just reformatting and coloring the code sections in PM-posts with perltidy will give a popularity boost after a year.

Maybe also automatically included back-links to newer discussions might help ( there must be a reason why an older discussion was linked later, so let's show the newer one, too)

> and made the same complaints about them.

he has his preferred compiled language + IDE which is "far superior" but practically fell out of grace nowadays.

It's so obscure I can't possibly name it without identifying him.

And after all he's only an example for a big part of the business, that's the reality, no need to point him out.

My message is: IDEs are very important!