Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.
It's certainly easy to calculate the average attendance for Perl conferences.
I'm reminded of the day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, 'What is that, swearing?
Although the Perl Slogan is There's More Than One Way to Do It, I hesitate to make 10 ways to do something.
The problems that I really like to solve are our cultural problems.
Perl was designed to work more like a natural language. It's a little more complicated but there are more shortcuts, and once you learned the language, it's more expressive.