Perl - The most disliked programming language?

As you can see the top-3 three really stand out of the rest! You can easily disregard 2nd and 3rd "best", as nobody really uses VBA or Delphi anymore. Unlike those, Perl is being used. Even your Linux has it installed. All, but the tiny distros pre-install it into base image. Also those popular Mint and similar have it as an option. The obvious reason why Perl is being installed used everywhere is the wide popularity back in the 90s. Perl pre-dates Linux and was pretty much the only scripting language in that era, if not counting BASH or Tcsh scripting. Then times changed and Perl paved the way for PHP, Ruby, Python and the likes.

I don't understand who would NOT love a programming language that can be written with shift-key pressed down all the time!

Here, I present some of the most beautiful pieces of code ever written in Perl (also known as Obfuscated Perl Contest):

• The 1st Annual Obfuscated Perl Contest, Best in "The Perl Journal" category:
  package S2z8N3;{
   $zyp=S2z8N3;use Socket;
       (S2z8N3+w1HC$zyp)&
   open SZzBN3,"<$0"
;while(<SZzBN3>){/\s\((.*p\))&/
    &&(@S2zBN3=unpack$age,$1)}foreach
  $zyp(@S2zBN3){
 while($S2z8M3++!=$zyp-
30){$_=<SZz8N3>}/^(.)/|print $1
      ;$S2z8M3=0}s/.*//|print}sub w1HC{$age=c17
;socket(SZz8N3,PF_INET,SOCK_STREAM,getprotobyname('tcp'))&&
connect(SZz8N3,sockaddr_in(023,"\022\x17\x\cv"))
       ;S2zBN3|pack$age}
   
• The 4st Annual Obfuscated Perl Contest, 3rd in Do Something Powerful category:
  $_=q(s%(.*)%$_=qq(\$_=q($1),$1),print%e),s%(.*)%$_=qq(\$_=q($1),$1),print%e
   
• The 5h Annual Obfuscated Perl Contest, Winner of The Old Standby category:
  #:: ::-| ::-| .-. :||-:: 0-| .-| ::||-| .:|-. :||
open(Q,$0);while(<Q>){if(/^#(.*)$/){for(split('-',$1)){$q=0;for(split){s/|
/:.:/xg;s/:/../g;$Q=$_?length:$_;$q+=$q?$Q:$Q*20;}print chr($q);}}}print"\n";
#.: ::||-| .||-| :|||-| ::||-| ||-:: :|||-| .

Who would ever hate that?

Look! Even this kitten thinks, it's just a concise form of programming. Nothing to be hated.