Are you implying that people like Larry Wall, Yukihiro Matsumoto and Guido van Rossum, all of who have advanced degrees in computer science are not (good?) engineers?
Well, to be fair, the original Ruby interpret was a very naive AST-walking interpreter. Not that Matz isn't a good engineer; I think he probably just wanted to experiment. (Take a look at the Ruby parser sometime if you need confirmation that Matz is both brilliant and possibly insane.)
Perl's internals are a little weird but are really fast at text processing. I wouldn't necessarily hold Perl up as a good piece of software engineering, but it's still much better than what most people could write.
(I'm agreeing with you though. Your parent's comment is absurd.)
They might be good hackers, but have no idea how a VM should be implemented. That's why you got this mess.
Just look how they designed the ops, the primitives, the calling convention, the stack, the hash tables. This is not engineering, this was amateurish compared to existing practice.
I gave already and I didn't call them more professional. I called them engineered, in opposite to those simple adhoc implementations. The only part why worse is better in this regard was because of getting business attraction.
lua, v8, guile (but just last year), smalltalk and family (esp. strongtalk and the other pre-v8 projects), ml and family (MLton and ocaml), haskell (after many years of being too slow), any better scheme (>20), any better lisp (>5), php7 (just last year), and then the tiny lua based ones, like potion, wren, tinyrb, tinypy or tvmjit (with simple method ast->jit), or partially io, lily, or the other post-smalltalk languages, like maru (simpliest ast->jit) or the soda family around alan key and ian piumarta.
when you design a 20-100x slower calling convention without proper support for lexical variables, slow data, no unboxing, no tagging, slow ops, no inlining, no fast memory reclamation you are in the pre-SICP days and should be treated like that.
not even talking about the modern static languages and type systems which are now catching up, via llvm. not go or rust, but stuff like pony or julia.