> Also perl is apparently as fun for humans python which I also find suspect after maintaining perl 5.x code.

When people talk about a language being 'fun', they need to distinguish between writing something new for the first time vs maintaining something or figuring out someone else's code.

Yeah I suppose at this point the graph falls apart since even the prospect of writing new perl code does not sound fun to me but I am sure could be fun to someone.

Yeah, I wouldn't want to be writing new Perl either. It was actually Ruby's "optimized for developer happiness" mantra that triggered my comment.

Sometimes I mumble under my breath that Ruby is Perl for the 21st century - gleefully creative hackers leaving behind overly clever code for far less happy developers to deal with.

A culture of optimising the elegance of the API over the simplicity and maintenance of the implementation.

I disagree. With practice, you can write very clean Perl code that's easy to follow along because all the modules play along nicely. Ruby OTOH has a culture of gems doing all kinds of mysterious black magic that make it difficult for a maintainer to figure out the data flow.

Source: Maintained a 300 kLOC Perl application for 3 years, now working with legacy and new Rails applications.