Your anecdote reminds me of something that happened to me at work just a few days ago. A "data scientist" -- young guy, very hip -- saw over my shoulder that I was working on some Perl, and he quipped with a smirk, "Oh, you're a Perl guy? I'll try not to hold that against you."

My immediate thought was, "Oh, you're a douchebag? I'll try not to hold that against you!"

Point is, Perl has a uniformly bad reputation among whole generations of programmers. Although a few of us know better, it's still a reality which will be changed neither by Awesome New Version!!1! nor by version number manipulexyacculation.