[PeCaN]

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.)