While calling functions with an ampersand may not have any obvious advantages...

It in fact has three disadvantages: it bypasses any prototype coercions, it passes @_ unmodified by default, and it's unidiomatic.

I'd argue that C-style loops are a good idea...

All of these fencepost errors I've fixed argue otherwise.

I just wish Perl 5 had a good OO system.

Try Moose.

I think one has to be programming Perl for 40+ hours a week, in order for their mind to stay fresh enough in Perl...

I think you have to understand the two underlying philosophical notions of Perl and know how to use the documentation to use it effectively. The book Modern Perl (I wrote it; electronic versions are free) explain those straightaway.

How can a perl novice understand what "chomp while chomp;" does ?

Could said novice read the documentation?

Install cpanminus from the CPAN then. I do.

Some sort of consumption tax would be the fairest...

Provided a single personal deduction for necessities (and not the $75 annual deduction for sales tax on groceries in states like Idaho), yes.

Good luck convincing even a single taxing authority to enact that, though.

... rich people pay higher more tax rates than not-rich people?

Income tax rates, sure. Let's talk about payroll taxes and capital gains taxes too.

the type-safety of Perl

Perl has better type safety than JavaScript. Compare string concatenation in both languages, for example.

Garbage collected language runtimes don't fragment memory, or if they do they can clean it up very easily.

It's incredibly easy to fragment memory in a language with GC; see Firefox.

With that said, you can use a copying or compacting GC strategy to minimize the possibility, but then you increase your memory requirements to manage the copy and you reduce your cache coherence.

The Escape key should do it.

How about a web based system? ClubCompy's Tasty language does exactly that.

(Disclaimer: I consult on ClubCompy.)

the roots of the word are religious

The roots of the word are normal Greek words for "good" or "well" and "messenger".

Because people with Cs in their titles make deployment decisions based on potentially false assumptions....

I can easily imagine that such organizations have much more dramatic problems than Mozilla's numbering scheme.

[T]here is no theoretical problem predicting all allocations of a python program at compile time...

... until you do IO.

If Perl 6 had been presented from the start as an experimental 'sister language' (perhaps with a different name), rather than being named as Perl 5's successor over a decade early, perhaps the perception would now be different.

People express that sentiment often, but I've never found it realistic. Many of the philosophical goals of Perl 6 are the same philosophical goals Larry had when designing Perl 5. Many of the tactical approaches are far different, but there's where my disagreement with the "It deserved the label as an experiment at the time!" idea arises. No one really knew how far redesigning Perl needed to go to achieve those philosophical goals until the RFCs and Apocalypses started pulling at loose strings in the sweater.

Isn't your term 'Modern Perl' itself a way of saying that things have changed a bit since 1993, even though we're still using 'Perl 5'?

Certainly, though it's less about using new and exciting features because they're new and exciting than it is about understanding how the language and its features, both new and old do—and, in some cases, don't—work. The biggest and most important language change has been the gradual lexicalizing of features such as filehandles, pragmas, grammar modifications, and even packages. You may have to squint to see the latter, but it's there. Perl 6 takes that principle to another level.

With better PR, Perl 5.10 could easily have been 'Perl 6'.

That would have been extremely silly.

Modern Perl 5 is a good language with great libraries, but Perl 5 still has many, many flaws that only breaking backwards compatibility in a very dramatic way could fix. You can take the Perl 5.10 approach of deprecating a few of the worst offenders and considering removing them and eventually replacing them, but that process will take decades.

Also, the Perl 5 core is very, very difficult to maintain.