C is a hacker's language in the sense that it will allow you to do anything you want even if it seems you sneakily bend the rules a bit. (If only I had a fish for every segfault I caused ...). And even if it has some distance from assembly, it will also allow you to be in close some contact with the hardware.

Then C++ came and Java and each of them was more eager than its predecessor to distant programmer from machine and programmer from fellow-programmer. They were also blatantly trying to patronise the programmer into certain programming practices and restrict his/her actions. Recently one error in a C++ program made gcc spill out 500 suggestions of "perhaps you wanted to spell this function's name this way or call it in that way?". The terminal buffer run out from the incessant scrolling of gcc's idiotic blabering and still I had no idea where the error was.

Portability and Productivity they cited.

Java aims to provide an environment for programmers to produce something without the risk of breaking anything. And here we start with "you can't do that", you "can't cast to this". Add to this, hordes of domesticated programmers, mostly harmless and brilliant (programming) minds otherwise, ready to declare that "this is an anti-pattern", "ohh very bad practice in modern software development", or the classic irritant "why do you want to do that?" - a trademark response it seems at the "knowledge sharing" site we all know very well. See for example here: Why would you want to do that? or I can't see any reason to do that and all the answers under it. Signs of the times.

Any economic system demands optimal allocation and use of resources. It is common sense. But Capitalism demands that optimality for the sake of maximising profit for the Owner and the Investor. And even with modern stock-markets, pension funds, government bailouts, etc. a lot of us (residents of planet earth) are neither. Directly or indirectly we gain nothing.

The changes caused by this practice in our lives are inescapable though. No longer one can find a place to live alone or in a community of similarly minded people. It's like a river, a tsunami, the gozzilla. You can't escape it. And yet, still "a small village resists..." Perl allows you to do anything you want in any way you want to or feel to. Take the use strict;. It saves lives but has never been enforced! And rightly so i say.

Even OOP in Perl is never advertised as "the thing to do". It is an "unexplained" phenomenon that Perl OOP and Perl non-OOP happily coexist together. And it's also interesting that most Perl OOP tutorials ground you with "Perl OOP is nothing but a blessed hash ..." - last time I argued that C++ is nothing but glorified use of C struct I nearly got punched.

Bottomline: as alexander_lunev said: "new-age-capitalistic-agile-scrum-sweatshop-shit". This is inescapable and caused by the internal workings of Capitalism: productivity comes only with alieanation of the worker from the means of production and with other workers: meaningless, repetitive, un-creative work. Alone, alone, alone. Modern programming languages are no exception. They will sooner or later (if not already) be swept by this. In fact, as IT is the driver of the wealth today (like the automotive industry used to be last century and we saw the "production line" was invented there), programming languages are nothing to play with or joke about. And communities formed by users of such languages are nothing to play or joke about either. They reflect exactly the climate at work and the pressure they feel there by the Corporation. Most of them ended or will soon end to being very serious about supporting the hand that feeds them, self-appointed brownie collectors who love to patronise those who feel and probably are freer than them in doing things in many ways, the way they want to, albeit unproductively.

Perl is probably the last prog. language which prides in "there are many ways to do this". That's great and that's why it attracts those "friendly, non-patronizing or demeaning programmers".

Now this is my personal opinion and I am not trying to promote anything here. I know a lot of people are sensitive when talking about politics. However, I am talking about economy. In any event, I am sorry if I stepped on some toes with my boots. If it makes you feel better, I have censored myself on the wealth re-distribution issue