If they spent two seconds researching Modern Perl and Enlightened Perl they would say WOW look where Perl has come!!!

As a fellow bioinformatician and programmer, I have to say that I could not possibly care less about these things. They're slick marketing around some slick code that some people find useful. A sizable number of modules on CPAN (though a small fraction of the total) are just as useful, but not as aggressively marketed.

What would I like to see?

• Easier interop with other high-level languages like Matlab and R. All of them have C interfaces, but going through C requires writing two bindings. I've usually found it easier to just have perl read and print the other language's data format (this is what many of the CPAN modules do, too), but that's not necessarily all that efficient.
• Easier C binding. Inline::C is pretty good, but requires a compiler and doesn't feel quite "done." Maybe C::DynaLib would do the trick.
• Simpler PDL. PDL is very powerful, but it's not conceptually simple, and it uses terminology unfamiliar to anyone coming from another mathematical language. Also, it can be tricky to install, requiring both C and FORTRAN compilers, as well as some weird external libraries, to get the most from it.
• A better Bioperl. IMHO Bioperl is an over-engineered disaster (or at least it was 4-5 years ago when I last looked at it). Someone who started over from scratch, developing efficient representations for sequences and graphs, then building data input/output routines for various tools' formats, would be doing the world a great service.

Even without these things, I use Perl as the glue for much of my work, and find it works just fine.

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