Perl has too much junk in. That makes it easy to hate for all the clutter, but it is technically superior to most everything else out there: it's usually faster and subsumes all paradigm elements.
In practice the problem is that speed often comes from C, and so it isn't consummate with the pan-paradigmatic nature1, not to mention the fact that the latter is ritually abused in practice2 and worse: there are no clear visible signifiers as to which paradigm(s) the code accords, giving it its particular 'read-only' nature (this is compounded by the Chimera effect.)
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1. In fact, it is sleight of hand to claim speed and flexibility in this way, though pure Perl code is still considerably faster than a good number of other popular general-purpose languages.
2. By eg. combining elements which are not complimentary, producing behavior with wild discontinuities. This in particular is the Chimera effect, or simply a Chimera.[/m]
>>12
Except C++ isn't usually faster than the languages it competes with. I'm not sure where I stand on the subsumption of paragigm elements, but that really depends on how you take the sample.