>>12
Well, the core of my post was... what are you using Perl for, and why exactly do you want to replace it?
Whose code is it? Your own? Is it just your choice? If the change is mostly for the fun of it, try a functional language, they'll feel very fresh and clean.
You know what the JVM is, probably, and Clojure is an impure functional language with its fair share of libraries, and the ability to call Java methods freely.
The syntactic bit is mostly a matter of aesthetics, which to a point I'm willing to sacrifice, it's true, but aesthetics can be critiqued, right? If I said that it was only good for statement-oriented languages, it's because anything which looks like control flow will have too many spiky tokens piled up to look neat when used as a single expression, even if it made sense.
Take a look at this Javascript snippet, of a kind which gets written thousands of times every day by programmers all over the world:
$("#car").on("change", function (event) {
var x = event.target.val % 2 == 0 ? "foo" : "bar";
alert(x);
});
As for the other... scripting languages are all piles of cutesy features thoughtlessly cobbled together that run
SLOW AS FUCK, riddled with redundant features, arbitrary restrictions and ill-thought out implementations of sound ideas, like the hacky scoping, idiotic type systems, an the list goes on.
But, as I said, Perl's just lovely for dealing with streams from files and Unix-utility sewage, with easy output redirection, regexes in the syntax, and being able to open the output of shell commands as files (I loved that feature back when I held a Perl job). It almost makes you want to forgive the inconsistent syntax and the inconvenience of using references in lieu of its stupid naked datastructures, for which all the core functions are made.