Perl, like Tcl, comes from the Walter Bishop Era of IT, where things were apparently batshit crazy at times but they managed to do things we now fail to replicate :D
Now, much effort is spent in making sure that a single team member cannot get weird ideas and do too much on their own.
Heh. I literally just tabbed away from watching an episode of Fringe[1] to check HN. I didn't expect to walk right into a Walter Bishop reference.
You make a good point though: what do you do with somebody like Walter who is simultaneously A. batshit crazy and B. a genius? I guess the Fringe approach of having people (Astrid, Peter, etc) to "babysit" him most of the time is one approach, but it probably doesn't scale. And one slip-up could result in... well, the end of the world in the fictional case. Hopefully nothing quite so dramatic is at stake here in our real (??) world.
Just don't let the crazy guy keep a cow in the office...
Now the new fashion is having a bazillion of YAML files, describing Kubernetes containers full of WASM modules, replicating application servers on the edge.
ingy is batshit insane (and great fun to collaborate and/or drink with) but even he didn't expect text templated turing complete YAML to happen.
helm does still (last I checked) allow you to use your own transform script rather than the template engine so for private helm charts you can use https://yglu.io with data in environment variables to get less fragile templating if you can get away with doing it that way.
I find Rust a bit hard to follow (having not studied it in any great detail) but a good deal of that boilerplate either avoids common problems in code or allows you to explicitly say "yes I know I'm doing something dangerous".
However for a while you're right people may have gotten a little bit carried away with "RIIR" - but I cannot fault someone for being enthusiastic :)
Well, when the pair of Rust Witnesses come by in suit and tie to testify to the power of their language and to ask you to move to that language, you're supposed to kidnap them and make them write the program and boring boilerplate for you.
Now, much effort is spent in making sure that a single team member cannot get weird ideas and do too much on their own.