Alternative take: I am not smart skilled enough to know what I really want. I’m not a language designer. I could put together a long wishlist and it might well end up as a language I hated to use because it would lack integrity and internal consistency. For all the guff Perl gets about some design choices, like $stuff[1], I think its design is subversively brilliant and partly counter intuitive. I’ve told my tale often: I started “hacking” at 10 or 11 and fell completely away from it a few years later for more than a decade. I never would have come back without Perl because only Perl made it fun.

I do know that environment, ecology is crucial. If it is not easier in the future to create, test, build, vet, and distribute “CPAN” packages than it is today, that’s lead in a swimmer’s pockets. I don’t know how relevant that can be to language changes but I feel like it should be a concern deeper than vanilla backwards-compatibility. Personally, I have had a rough go trying to integrate C-libs into code. I would love for that to be easy. I’d settle for less difficult. That relates directly to catching up the CPAN. There are a lot of mid-level JAPHs like me that would be wrapping up modern libraries regularly.