That’s the joke, but it’s really not true.

You can write unintelligable code in most languages.

Perl’s syntax is fine, and you can write beautiful code with it - but it will also let you write fugly code that works.

I think those who say this seriously just don’t understand Perl, or even programming generally. (Whilst I like Perl, I’m also proficient in C, Java, JS, Python, PHP, Bash and probably a few more, so I’m not just promoting the only thing I know.)

Perl. Its installed everywhere I need to run it and stuff I wrote over 20 years ago is still doing exactly what it should.

Nah, it’s fine. Boot times are considerably faster than sys.v in most cases, and it has a huge amount of functionality. Most people I work with have adopted it and much prefer it to the old init.d and sys.v systems.

People’s problem with systemd (and there are fewer people strongly against it than before) seem to break down into two groups:

1. They were happy with sys.v and didn’t like change. Some were unhappy with how distros adopted it. (The debian wars in particular were really quite vicious)

2. It does too much. systemd is modular, but even so does break one of the core linux tenets - “do one thing well”. Despite the modularity, it’s easy to see it as monolithic.

But regardless of feelings, systemd has achieved what it set out to do and is the defacto choice for the vast majority of distros, and they adopted it because it’s better. Nobody really cares if a user tries to make a point by not using it any more, they’re just isolating themselves. The battle was fought and systemd won it.