My dislike of Perl comes from personal experience in using it. I don't think one can have valid strong opinions of a language without having used extensively.

I feel like some programming languages, no matter the structure of the application, feels unstructured and write-only in nature. To me, Perl is one of such languages. Python has a similar effect, but I feel like it is more controllable as long as the project is kept within a sensible length.

So while that abomination was primarily the fault of the designer, I do think that Perl invites this behavior one way or another.

(I gave up entirely on reading that disaster of a build script, and instead instrumented system() so that I could trace the calls to various tools and infer the logic myself.)