I think the problem with almost all mainstream languages today that they are morally outdated. I feel for the next decade the industry will be striving for programming languages optimized either for developer's productivity, for correctness or for the execution performance and/or minimized footprint. Most languages today, including Python and Perl (and many others) sadly are not making progress in any of those directions. That's why programmers are desperately trying to find better ways, jumping from OOP to functional, from dynamically typed to statically typed, creating new frameworks, trying all sorts of hacks to improve concurrency, performance characteristics, etc. Burnout rates are high, and writing software is more complicated than ever. You can literally choose any PL from TIOBE's top 10 and if you get enough expertise - you'd realize that it is nothing but a big clusterfuck of a language.