I think it's a pretty weak reason to give up on a language because you were using a global variable and expecting it to automatically be treated as a local vari

I think it's a pretty weak reason to give up on a language because you were using a global variable and expecting it to automatically be treated as a local variable within your function. As others have mentioned, you are using a global variable ($_) inside a function. This is generally considered a bad practice. The standard perl idiom of getting your function arguments via shift would make this a non-issue.