While the comments by Dietrich Ayala (The quote is "Obviously I screwed up somewhere, but I've only been using Perl since 1993, so I'm not an expert") do present a valid point, the case for perl vs the rest of the world is almost always overstated in favor of 'the rest of the world'. It would appear perl is very hateable. Personally I think that we NEED to move beyond c-like languages (and no, I'm not talking about garbage collection either) to see real productivity gains. The points on Software Pragmatism still stand however, so a language capable of complicated interpretation should expose the complicated interpretation to the programmer - in the debugger, I guess.

Something like SQL EXPLAIN : What did you do to arrive at the interpretation for my questions, that you arrived at.

Maybe perl 6 - with the grammar represented IN the language will be able to do something like this.