[tyingq]

>lacks essential concepts like object orientation and exceptions

Perl does OO without Moose. There is a tiny bit of boilerplate, but it's essentially bless() and 1 or 2 lines in the constructor.

Try/catch blocks are indeed an add on. The traditional pattern is more golang like, returning an error code, then using Carp or similar for stack traces.

>Why would you choose something like this instead of Python or Ruby?

That might be an interesting discussion for a large codebase, but for something limited in scope like this, I just don't see the problem.