Perl didn't really break ground. Perl has never been a pioneer. Perl is the railway that provided common folk with a feasible opportunity to travel close to the frontier.

In this sense, Perl6 is shaping up to be a worthy inheritant of its heritage. While I dislike aspects of it, it's the only "agile" language effort that evidently tries to bring ideas deeply explored in theory but hardly used in practice to the common codeslave's desk. Every other language seems stuck rehashing concepts that we've been using almost since the dawn of computing.