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.

I’ve shipped Perl code so yeah, I have

That's a difference without a distinction

Good luck getting any two people to agree on a sharp line between programming language and scripting language. Perl seems to swap sides depending on the year people are arguing about it.

In my experience those can't discern what's what are usually the ones who mainly did a bit of dabbling in either.

Assuming you've done more than dabbling, what's specifically the difference to you then?

For many people especially old timer sysadmins, anything interpreted at runtime is a script.

TBH, prior to perl6, perl was such a horrid inconsistent mess, it reeked of shell.

BASIC and Pascal are real general-purpose programming languages as well, but I don't know anyone who uses them for anything serious.

Entire enterprises ran/still run on Business BASIC and Delphi code. Billion-dollar fortunes have been made on such code. Those languages are used for serious things all the time.

* for new code