So as someone else who started, many years ago, with Perl 5 ... I'd have to say, doesn't this take away from your argument? I've seen my share of "not great" perl, and most of it still used lexically scoped vars (AIUI Perl 4 used typeglobs a lot more too ... but that's also something I don't see).

If anyone said "oh, isn't that just a scripting language" to me recently, I'd be tempted to reply "What, like Java?"