Perl is a sysadmin language. There's "always" been this tension between sysadmins and developers.
In my mind (developer back then) I'd amateur-psychoanalyze all of that nonsense as some kind of inferiority complex meant to preserve the self image. Needless complexity can be a feature!
That quote is not very convincing to me. Both parts of it are questionable.
Just being able to play chess is not a very high bar at all. Most 6-year-olds can learn it in an hour. Are the Chess hustlers at Washington Square Park all Gentlemen?
I don't see being able to play Chess well as any kind of deficiency. It could be that it's just someone's hobby. It doesn't have to mean they spiraled into madness, Bobby Fisher style.
(I can play chess, but not well, so I personally don't care about either half of that quote as it applies to me)
I think it's a sysadmin thing to have a little bit more wimsy in the code.
Administrative work by nature leaves you a bit bored, if you do it right. So you sometimes pick something up just to play with.
I can't speak about every sysad experience, but in mine a lot of scripts tend to be in a "make once, remember for ten years" category, and even a bit of creative naming can help a long way.
Working with a larger codebase with "creative" code, on the other hand, is frustrating. And if you don't have to write code, you might as well go take a walk, "monitoring" isn't in your job description.
I think Perl is still more popular even today than Python as a sysadmin language. Late 2000s it certainly was. Maybe Google was different, but across the industry more widely Python was barely used, Perl was used everywhere.
As someone who lived through that transition, we used Perl extensively to sysadmin ~30 Solaris and Irix workstations and it was superlative at that.
At that time, Guido was still working at CNRI locally to us in Reston, VA and we had several discussions at the local Pyggies (Python User Group) on transitioning over to Python for that work. We were a (mostly) C++/Java shop, but Perl fit into all the other "crevices" beautifully.
Python just didn't have enough library support for all of our "swiss-army chainsaw" demands. Still, it was very apparent at the time it would eventually get there and I was enamored with its "one right way" of doing things--even at the bytecode level.
In my mind (developer back then) I'd amateur-psychoanalyze all of that nonsense as some kind of inferiority complex meant to preserve the self image. Needless complexity can be a feature!
And now we are all developers!