you forgot to mention the lack of function signatures, forcing people to use workarounds like my ($a,$b) = @_ and the need of manual parameter check.

> the fact that built-in exceptions are thrown as strings rather than objects (requiring string parsing if you want to catch and handle them)

And I wonder why this was never expanded to return blessed strings providing all meta informations...

IMHO many "problems" of Perl5 could be easily fixed if changing the code was easier.