1) regex was treated like the primary way to do things - even when it wasn't necessarily called for - at the expense of readability (and Perl supported it so well)
2) sysadmins
The two combined together (and possibly the fact that it was the early days of commercial internet service) led to the idea that anything done in Perl was destined to look like "line noise" to actual SWEs.
/just how I saw it...
All that Go delivers today, over the medium, is very similar to what perl also delivered yesteryear, on top of yesteryear medium. But also like perl, it is being born from a bunch of old unix system engineers :)
> daunting!
Go is often praised for being simple.
> modern!
...and criticized for being too simple, ignoring modern advances in programming language research.
> no compiler OMG!
The compiler and its careful tradeoff between fast compilation and fast programs is a key characteristic of Go.
> text transformation on the code itself!
Go doesn't have macros. Instead people fall back on code generation, just like Java.