I know you are joking, at least I hope so :)<p>Perl has many nice ideas, that were copied into other languages ... think regexp literals for example, and I know people got crazy about DSLs once Ruby got popular, but DSLs have been the norm in Perl since forever ... due to its flexible syntax and to its interpreter (see Devel::Declare ... which allows you to locally take over control from the Perl's parser ... such that you can add new syntax).<p>The only problem with Perl is that it wasn't supposed to be such high-level and general purpose. It was just supposed to be a replacement for grep / awk / sed. Then it got popular :)<p>Larry Wall is a really smart guy (I met him at the last YAPC::Europe) ... a little crazy though :) ... but he does have good ideas. See for instance this article on why Perl is the way it is ... <a href="http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html</a><p>I don't know why, but I like crazy people :)