I'll tell you why - because as an old APLer, I was thrilled with Perl in the beginning. A coworker asked me to evaluate it for a project he was working on - he wasn't a programmer as such. I was with it a few days when I started noticing how irritated I was when trying to read the code. I'd never really been emotionally irritated by something as abstract as a language, so I started looking into the history of it. A few of the ponderous smart-ass screeds of Wall gave me my answer.

I would give anything if there were a profitable programming skill I could at least tolerate. I love programming, but all the beautiful idioms are dead in the water. That is why I bitch.