> the basis by which other people will (apparently) judge their technical expertise
You lost me here. Even if someone thinks that Perl is an unholy abomination to work with, it doesn't follow that those with expertise in it are less skilled. If anything, it seems like it implies the opposite: expertise in it is harder. The counterpart would be something like claiming that Python is a toy language, simple to use but not suitable for Real Work. This claim is the exact opposite as the Perl complaint, and it seems like _that_ would imply negative things about expertise in the language.
I cut my teeth on stuff that would have a lot of folks 'round these parts, crouching under their Uplifts, clutching their teddy-bears, peeing their pants, sucking their thumbs, and sobbing. I started off doing Machine Code and embedded stuff, back when that was still fairly new.
I am very happy to use a nice, safe, memory-avoiding, strongly-typed language like Swift as my principal language, and on a GUI system.
I don't particularly care whether or not some rando on teh Internets tubes thinks I'm a "wuss."
You lost me here. Even if someone thinks that Perl is an unholy abomination to work with, it doesn't follow that those with expertise in it are less skilled. If anything, it seems like it implies the opposite: expertise in it is harder. The counterpart would be something like claiming that Python is a toy language, simple to use but not suitable for Real Work. This claim is the exact opposite as the Perl complaint, and it seems like _that_ would imply negative things about expertise in the language.