Last 10 years? Make sure you don't buy garbage made by Whirlpool as it's made to fall apart in a very short time. This is the front of our gasrange after less than 5 years of careful use: http://toxicice.com/images/eng...
According to Whirlpool this is "normal wear and tear". Good luck using an oven if you can't even read the markings anymore
Aside: the "clock" doesn't even have battery backup. It's 80's technology but made to last way less long.
A lot of best practices for Perl are good programming practices in general. Of course there are (plenty) of exceptions, but that's the case with other languages as well. One thing one wants to avoid is to program Python in Haskell or Pascal in C, for example.
As for hard to read (for a beginner) have a look at Haskell, for example.
Python's fame is that it "reads like pseudocode". That's nice, but utterly fails if a programmer has no good feel for algorithms. Pascal used to have the same fame. A few years back I had to reimplement a Pascal program into Perl. One of the pieces of code was 100+ lines. After some studying it turned out to be a variant of bubble sort. At the end few lines reversed the sort order (!). It could be replaced with a few lines of Perl. And no, not because I write short and cryptic code. The code could've been written way shorter in Pascal as well, even when implementing a sort manually.
Those things are happening or planned except for the version number change.
Tweaks to make complex data structures less of a nightmare: http://search.cpan.org/dist/pe...
better integrate the object model: https://github.com/stevan/p5-m...
Numeric stability is probably not all that important when you're guessing.