I mean, I worked in the .com era with perl coders who made some pretty compelling products out of Perl, for the time, with some discipline, and TBH... it wasn't terrible, and when they "Did the right thing" and rewrote the whole thing in the new hotness (J2EE) it _was_ terrible.

Perl will let you hang yourself, and I hated it at the time, but it also got the job done.