We can definitly do better than Perl. The easy proof is that modern Perl projects are supposed to start with a bunch of config to make Perl more sane, and many

We can definitly do better than Perl. The easy proof is that modern Perl projects are supposed to start with a bunch of config to make Perl more sane, and many of them also include the same third-party libraries that e.g. improve exception handling and tweak the datetime functionality in the standard library. One benefit Perl had that I think not many of the other languages do was being designed by a linguist. That makes it different -- hard to understand at first glance -- but also unusually suitable for prototyping.