Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.
It's certainly easy to calculate the average attendance for Perl conferences.
Information doesn't want to be free. Information wants to be valuable.
Unix is like a toll road on which you have to stop every 50 feet to pay another nickel. But hey! You only feel 5 cents poorer each time.
If someone stinks, view it as a reason to help them, not a reason to avoid them.
Are you perchance running on a 64-bit machine?