But that's the problem! I don't want clever, witty, whimsical. I want clear, simple, precise.
This is what went seriously wrong with Perl. In the 90s when Perl was doing well it was fashionable to be wacky like this. Then around 2000 the fashion suddenly changed and the industry grew up and people started to take things more seriously. Now Perl looks terribly out of date and silly.
Really?
Goofy codenames for projects (Bionic Beaver, etc), the sign of a 'serious' project is having a cartoon mascot, 'open source' people relying on closed/proprietary things like slack, macOS, etc. instead of open/libre alternatives, 1 page github READMEs and API docs as 'documentation' but having a youtube channel full of 'howto' videos instead
there is probably an equal amount of goofyness/immaturity and seriousness then as now - it just manifests differently
The programming language industry, yes. There was a marked shift towards simplicity away from silly whimsy. The extreme example is Go.
Personally, I'm happy that we live in a time where we have many different languages featuring meny different paradigms; I find it refreshing and stimulating.
I'm not in charge of what language the Perl projects choose to use.
> Personally, I'm happy that we live in a time where we have many different languages featuring meny different paradigms
You're not arguing against what anyone in this thread said.