Mm. I think if you're programming in perl, you probably already know that you won't have a lot of confidence in it. People joke about perl being a write-only language -- if you care about your program, and you expect to be maintaining it, you shouldn't be doing it in perl anyway, so the fact that it's hairy in a deep computational sense is maybe irrelevant, given that it's hairy and error-prone in every other way, too. It's sort of satisfying to know that the defects in perl really are deep and fundamental; but even the ephemeral and shallow defects are quite serious enough that anybody using perl for something critical should have their programming license revoked.

It's a language designed for knocking out short little scripty things, that probably only get run a handful of times. And yeah, certainly, nobody ought to design a language like perl in the future -- but precisely the problem with perl is that it grew by accretion.