Without trying to defend the merits of the language: I've watched the videos and those presentations were entertaining and nothing more. It's essentially well received trolling. The presenter knows the language so poorly that he conflated some core concepts as well as mixing up the distinction of issues in libraries versus in the language itself.

Really. There's lots of things wrong with Perl (all versions) and the same can be said about any other language. Alas these talks are among the worst put together criticisms I've seen so far.

Those presentations were abhorrent and the conference should be embarrassed for giving such a buffoon the stage (twice!). He doesn't know the language and then lampoons it when he gets it wrong. Here are some rebuttals (one of which is mine) to the second talk https://gist.github.com/preaction/978ce941f05769b064f4. There are other rebuttals for the first one which can be found without too much difficulty.

Heard of that video. It's about Perl 6's sister language, Perl 5. And the presenter basically did this for shits and giggles. Even the module that supposedly has the exploits he talks about hasn't been recommended to use for over a decade.

I painfully watched the entire first presentation a while back, and at least a small part of the second before quitting. They both came across like "look how many times I can use the F word in an hour -- aren't I super smart and cool? -- I'm SO David Hansson".

I'll pass -- if it was just a troll (both times?), well I can't stand trolls anyway.

I didn't find it at all entertaining or funny. Mostly it just sounded sanctimonious.

Those talks could be summarizes as: Don't use CGI. Nobody has used it for over a decade so it's not really tested.

Which are good points, but you probably knew that anyway. The rest is just a lot of pictures from the web and some guy screaming "wtf!!" a lot.

It has very little to do with Perl5 the language. The part where he touches on that subject is based on misunderstandings on what contexts and references are.

Looks like that's about Perl 5, not 6. (I am not going to watch such long videos without more info up front.)

The problems in that video are P5 centric. P6 is very different as far as how under the hood works

P5 centric, and old P5 centric, and the videos aren't funny. He could have just said "Perl 5 sucks" and left the stage and the videos would have been of equivalent value (as in, they aren't worth anything).