I disagree with the suggestion that Perl is not built with a consistent philosophy. That philosophy isn't "build from a minimal set of orthogonal features", but

I disagree with the suggestion that Perl is not built with a consistent philosophy. That philosophy isn't "build from a minimal set of orthogonal features", but it's a coherent design philosophy: http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl_2016/01-perl-philosophy.html#VGhlUGVybFBoaWxvc29waHk http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl_2016/01-perl-ph... Many (but not all) of the questionable decisions in Perl come from its origins in Unix philosophy and the desire to provide a comfortable migration path for system administrators away from command-line tools such as awk and shell. Where Perl's struggled in recent years to borrow features from Rakudo, it's because those features assume a different underlying philosophy.