[apercu]

It might be a generational thing.

When I started out as a sysadmin it was all shell and glue and different syntax on the 8 different flavours of *NIX I worked on between '94 and '97, then I found Perl suddenly you could actually build things that felt "real". It took me straight into web application development by '98, and I'm not sure I would have stayed in this field had it not existed (I was also working in neuro-diagnostics at the time and might have stayed there).

I saw some really elegant stuff written in Perl.

I also saw some absolutely unhinged, impossible-to-maintain garbage.