It really, really depends on your exact requirements. I'm running my 3D printer (using OctoPi) on an ancient RPi 2 and the original camera module. The image quality is a bit, well, uhm, i get an imagine where i can see the printer moving with details high enough to see if everything works. So, the camera is good enough.

Uploading a big model is painfully slow. But that's usually 5 minutes out of a 5 day print job after having spend a week designing the thing. After uploading, the printing works smoothely. As far as computing power, i'd say it's good enough.

As far as Wifi goes, that too really depends on many factors. Using a USB Wifi dongle may not be the fastest solution, due to how the RPi implements USB. But especially if the Wifi signal in the target location is not very good, it's easy enough to go for a dongle that allows you to use an external antenna.

When it comes to using Perl on RPi: That's pretty much the only programming language i use on those things. Here's a five year old demo where i run a distributed genetic algorithm (written in Perl) on 10 RPIs plus an additional one RPi 3 to run the GUI (webserver written in Perl, PostgreSQL database and a browser): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZJB1FeZzj4

So i would say, unless you are requiring high quality video and high performance, go for a cheap option for your first project and see how you like it. Even if you decide to upgrade later, there will always be another projects that just needs a small Linux computer. Haven't had a single board computer yet that didn't eventually find a home in some one-off project or another.