My guess is that it just came off as unnecessarily (and unproductively) defensive, as it amounts to the argument that it's not impossible to write clean applications in Perl. Perl's problem has never been that it's impossible to write 'clean, well-factored' programs.
Thank you! I appreciate that you took the time to explain.
ESR is apparently saying (true at the time) that Perl can be hard to maintain. But by "Perl," I speculate that he was talking about coding in monolithic non-OO scripts which would be a drag in any language.
So his criticism of the language was fair in the 1990's, but only for that style of procedural coding.
I tried to look at his source, but his own links to his Perl stuff are broken:
So, yeah.. you can write hard-to-maintain code in any language, but I think many (including myself) would argue that it's much easier to do in Perl than many other languages. It's built into Perl ('more-than-one-way'), and explicitly avoided in python wherever possible. Bottom line: all things being equal, I'd argue you're more likely to end up with a Python codebase that's a pleasure to maintain than a Perl one.
