Just a wild guess, but perhaps they read your hyperbole literally?

I doubt it. I looked them up (because I care about people, and don't actually want to hurt them), and it seems that Perl is a big part of their repertoire. Perl means a lot to them, and my flippant comment was probably taken as "calling their baby ugly."

So, @peteretep, you have my sincere apology. It was a flippant remark. At the time I wrote it (mid-1990s), Perl was the best way to write portable CGI code. I took the time to learn it, and got fairly good at it.

Since then, I have found my muse in other languages, but I sincerely did not want to give offense. I doubt that deleting the comment would help.

You said you wrote some code, and the memory of it makes you still wake up screaming. What’s the alleged insult, exactly?

The deliberate misinterpretation is just a style of humor.