In previous life, worked on large object-oriented Perl. There was a difference between good Perl and the Perl in messy scripts. Good Perl was nice to work in but required discipline to keep organized.

I wonder if there was an earlier point of Perl's demise. Perl 5 came out with flexible object-oriented features, but it took years for packages like Moose to come out and make it nice and usable.

I always thought one of the best and worst things about Perl was the fact that you could build something like Moose with it.

But the bad side was that by the time someone was clever enough to invent Moose, all sorts of other bespoke object systems had been invented and used in the meantime, and your CPAN dependencies used every single one of them.