I remember some years ago we got somebody joining irc.perl.org #perl to ask for help replacing perl with lua as a game scripting system.

Obviously, a few people were like "uh, why would -we- want to help you with that?"

As soon as I saw an example of this existing code, however, I told said people to STFU ... because for some arsef_cked reason I don't understand at all, they'd used EmbPerl of all things for the scripting, which is basically "PHP for mod_perl" and exactly as horrible as you might imagine even when used for its actual purpose rather than in this case for something completely unrelated.

Even if sensible perl would've been an acceptable approach (and speaking as a veteran perl programmer, I would still consider lua to be more suitable; I strongly consider an importand part of the Zen of Perl to be knowing when to use something else) the approach they had taken was an abomination unto Nuggan and very much deserved to die.

What they had was very definitely the sort of perl code that justifiably contributes to people hating perl, and I considered it a service to perl to help them rip it out in favour of lua code that actually made sense.

(I, personally, think perl works very well as a scripting layer for e.g. irssi, though you might come away disagreeing if you read the average irssi script rather than ones written with a little care and concern ... but for a game? Nah, lua all the frigging way)