Perl 5 has many other sides apart from the context-dependence. To mention a few, the regex sublanguage is deeply integrated into the rest of the language, there's an active and versatile testing culture, and CPAN hosts 17k modules for countless of fields and applications.<p>Some of those (such as testing culture) are mirrored in other languages' cultures, others (such as CPAN) are unparalleled in scope. Ignoring Perl 5 based on a single feature causes you to miss out on all the truly good parts.