I personally believe there are 2 types of Perl - development which you’re talking about here, and sysadmin/devops.
For the first category you’re right - these days there’s not much difference between Perl vs Java vs Rust because abstractions are the same.
But where OP’s smugness comes from I totally agree when applied to the second category - there’s an ocean of a difference between using tools like Perl, awk, sed, jq, and bash to transform Unix command inputs and outputs that it really is a massive superpower. Try doing a day’s work of a Unix admin using these tips compared to writing Java to do it. Oceans I say!
But I don’t think their being a basement dweller genius as you put it is because of Perl - it’s the smugness for the same reason why BOFH Unix sysadmin got their reputation - their tools are literal superpowers compared to GUI tools etc and they can’t believe everyone doesn’t use them!
For the first category you’re right - these days there’s not much difference between Perl vs Java vs Rust because abstractions are the same.
But where OP’s smugness comes from I totally agree when applied to the second category - there’s an ocean of a difference between using tools like Perl, awk, sed, jq, and bash to transform Unix command inputs and outputs that it really is a massive superpower. Try doing a day’s work of a Unix admin using these tips compared to writing Java to do it. Oceans I say!
But I don’t think their being a basement dweller genius as you put it is because of Perl - it’s the smugness for the same reason why BOFH Unix sysadmin got their reputation - their tools are literal superpowers compared to GUI tools etc and they can’t believe everyone doesn’t use them!