I’m 42, and learned Perl at 14. I’ve worked with some very large Perl systems, and love it. Yes, there’s bad Perl, but I’ve never really understood the hate for it. The testing ecosystem and culture and documentation culture are first rate. The tooling like Mojolicious, DBIx::Class, etc are super well done.

These days I write TypeScript full-time, which I like, and there’s a lot I miss about Perl, while absolutely loving the types in TS. The few months I spent writing Python professionally didn’t convince me it was any simpler or better than Perl, and I quit that job to go back to writing in TS.