[TheLarch]

"The problem with Perl is that it tends to be a different language for every programmer."

Exactly. Larry Wall cited an analogy somewhere: if you want to know where to put walkways on a new campus, wait until pedestrians have worn trails into the grass and pave there. Perl docs repeatedly makes jokes along the lines of, "it does what you want, unless you want consistency. Bottom line, Perl was designed without predictability and consistency in mind. This makes it blazingly fast for development by one person, but the administrative overhead between multiple programmers balloons.

Because of a natural inclination to reduce the number of characters one uses, as you get comfortable with Perl you start taking more and more shortcuts. A singular moment in my long career occurred when I opened some old Perl code after leaving the language for a time. I stared for a long moment, dumbfounded. It was as if an alien had visited my computer and overwritten my code with what Wall has affectionately described as "line noise."

Also, I was awed by the feature set in Perl 6. I don't think any language outside of Lisp, C, and Smalltalk has had such profoundly new ideas. Pronouns in Perl 5 are still unique to my knowledge after 20+ years. Wall is wildly imaginative.

Perl is what made me realize, in the mid-90's, that OO is largely just a marketing term. A sufficiently powerful language provides whatever portions of OO you need a la carte.

[kazinator]

I would wade through a mile-wide swamp of pronouns on my hands and knees if I were promised named function arguments upon reaching the other side.

[raiph]

I've got a dozen wildly different ideas of what you mean...