Well, I actually
do hate
Perl. Well, not really with a passion, but whenever I dabbled with it, it just felt...
icky. That, and
Perl advocates tend to be annoying, arrogant evangelizers who write stuff like the above.
As I see it, the problem with Perl is that its flexibility and power comes at the price of a really ugly, hairy syntax that has far too many primitives and things to keep track of, especially the different kinds of variables. When I program, I want to think about the problem at hand, not about whether I'm using a statement in a scalar or list context. And after the code is written, it's damn near unmaintainable. Perl is embarassingly close to being a write-only language for something not designed to be one (like INTERCAL).