There is no hoopla outside of the echo chamber. If you want a truly amazing language I would suggest things like Haskell, Racket, Clojure, Erlang, Smalltalk, a

There is no hoopla outside of the echo chamber. If you want a truly amazing language I would suggest things like Haskell, Racket, Clojure, Erlang, Smalltalk, and/or Common Lisp. If you're looking for more batteries included then I'd suggest Python or perhaps Ruby. Things are always going on in those communities and they've made some great killer apps like Blender (python), Rails (Ruby), Django (Python) and countless more. These languages are just as flexible as Perl, though they have their strengths and weaknesses in different places than Perl does.