Perl 5 is in decline, no doubt. But it isn't because whomever you're visualizing when you wrote the above is an annoying nerd. People can and do disagree on the 'why'; I personally think it is the general decline of Unix-style syntax combined with the natural ebb and flow of language evolution.

If "what you've seen" is watching the compiler developers work through language design, the origin of your misconception at least makes a little sense, even if that's obviously a weird, unfair basis.

By all means, hate on perlmonks.org if you like. Just don't spread insulting nonsense.

In my realm I need things to be supportable by lots of people. I use languages that are modern + people want to use, I document like crazy, I use opinionated frameworks that have good track records, I need to hire engineers that can support the code I/others write, etc etc. I don't find your comment to be true, and will even go as far to say I've worked with very clean legacy code.

Tangential: If you look at any "popularity of language" studies Perl has been on a downward spiral for over a decade. Ex: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/perl/

I see "well that's just x" as a poor argument for, well... anything.

I've seen a lot of negligently written code with broken windows on the surface, that deep down turns out to be criminally insane.

If somebody's doesn't give a shit enough to indent their code, they usually don't give a shit enough to design it either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory

Anymore Grafana backed by InfluxDB w/Telegraf is my jam for the same general problem set (TIG stack).