A recent post of mine seems to have generated some heated comments on reddit.
In that post, I took a short Perl script someone else had written. My purpose was to make the script better by reducing the code that had to be written to accomplish a certain task while making if more efficient and replacing cryptic expressions such as sort {$$a[0] cmp $$b[0]} with easier to understand versions such as sort { $a->{skutitle} cmp $b->{skutitle} } which conveys “sort by skutitle” in a straightforward way.
In doing so, I was not trying to claim that Perl is better than Python or Ruby. I was trying to illustrate better ways of writing Perl. The fact that the original author of the code I improved upon had a language comparison in mind does not mean I find such comparisons fruitful.
Remember, Perl does not have to “suck” for your choice of language to be validated.