Yeah, there's a lot of that attitude in Perl culture. There's probably also more bad programming done in Perl than in most other languages. I think the reason for this is how Perl came into prominence.
Though Perl was used for years before the web was around, it was only known by a few crusty Unix people that normal humans probably wouldn't communicate with. (Apologies to those of you who fit this mold who are probably reading this. You know who you are. :-) I claim partial exemption being one of them myself.) Perl was an obvious choice for a lot of web interactivity, particularly with the release of Perl 5, about simultaneous with AOL putting people on the net and the web exploding.
Anyway, Perl is ultimate among languages that let you do a great deal with very little. Because of this, and books like Learn Perl in 8 Seconds Without Thinking, probably by Sams, a lot of non-programmers picked up a little syntax and were actually able to produce sorta-working stuff.
I think most of the thinkers of the thoughts that you've described are people who fall into this category. They're people without a solid grounding in computing, have little experience with other languages and probably lack the skill required to easily pick up other languages and tools. The swagger is a little defensive in most of the people who have it.
Now... that said, Perl does all kinds of rule. If you're actually good at programming, and happen to be working in the problem spaces at which Perl excels (which used to be a smallish space, but now includes mostly things not graphically oriented or very low level where the overhead of Perl becomes important), Perl is in my ever so humble opinion the best choice. It's flexibility, power and speed of development are just hard to rival with any other language.
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Though Perl was used for years before the web was around, it was only known by a few crusty Unix people that normal humans probably wouldn't communicate with. (Apologies to those of you who fit this mold who are probably reading this. You know who you are. :-) I claim partial exemption being one of them myself.) Perl was an obvious choice for a lot of web interactivity, particularly with the release of Perl 5, about simultaneous with AOL putting people on the net and the web exploding.
Anyway, Perl is ultimate among languages that let you do a great deal with very little. Because of this, and books like Learn Perl in 8 Seconds Without Thinking, probably by Sams, a lot of non-programmers picked up a little syntax and were actually able to produce sorta-working stuff.
I think most of the thinkers of the thoughts that you've described are people who fall into this category. They're people without a solid grounding in computing, have little experience with other languages and probably lack the skill required to easily pick up other languages and tools. The swagger is a little defensive in most of the people who have it.
Now... that said, Perl does all kinds of rule. If you're actually good at programming, and happen to be working in the problem spaces at which Perl excels (which used to be a smallish space, but now includes mostly things not graphically oriented or very low level where the overhead of Perl becomes important), Perl is in my ever so humble opinion the best choice. It's flexibility, power and speed of development are just hard to rival with any other language.