Indeed, perl people were and still are fanatical about easy text (i.e. richer than cstring) manipulation, and those other two languages fell short back then and even today you still have to do gymnastics for things perl does easy and well out of the box.  Text is something that a majority of applications need to deal with at some point, and a source of hard bugs and security issues when done wrong.  I am thankful for perl&#x27;s influence, but I disregard it as a serious language outside of some niches like ETL and log processing.  I&#x27;m skeptic that perl6 will change that, and there&#x27;s been so much progress elsewhere that failure doesn&#x27;t matter much, but I will wait a couple more years to see how the community responds and take a look at it myself if it pans out.