In his bio he has the most succinct and accurate description of Perl that I've ever seen:

> Perl is a wonderful language once you get over the fact that a slightly quirky set of syntax and embedded regular expressions have a tendency to make it look like line noise in the wrong light. Once you're used to it, it's a hell of an expressive dynamically typed language with a huge set of libraries and classes available for it.

Matt taught me everything I know about how to make commercial programming creative, engaging, artistic/craftsman type activity, aligned with my desire to keep everything open source to the maximum extent practical.

Another former colleague who is way more talented than I am emailed me privately to express a similar sentiment.

You'll find Matt's indirect influence in things like SQLAlchemy, and chunks of the enduring parts of the javascript ecosystem as well. He was known in the perl community, but his unparalleled thinking skills have a much wider indirect influence